Growing the Program - 1995

In the first six months of '95, we doubled our full-time staff, developed great teen programs and were open on weekends on a regular basis. We started teaching web based projects and implementing a new computer literacy curriculum. At the same time, we also experienced some new challenges- maintaining proper attendance in our adult evening classes and the children's drop-in program had become a struggle.

Several factors were undermining the success of the drop-in program. The children's drop-in had been growing steadily and now there were always more kids than computers. Also, teens had started hanging out at the center and working on their projects during the afternoon hours-displacing the younger kids. We had to enforce a teen-free environment in the kids space and made sure to provide at least one adult staff person to work with the children. One year later, after we bought the PC lab, we found ourselves facing a similar predicament. The teens started using Plugged In to play computer games on the new, fast machines and almost entirely displaced the adults who would come during the evening to use the drop in center.

For the Summer, we lined up a partnership with the city's Summer Recreation Program (we called it City Camp) and expanded our drop-in hours to include Fridays and we were no longer closed for all day staff discussions and planning. We had spent all year testing and refining our curriculum and preparing our infrastructure to accommodate the increased traffic.

It was a great Summer. We worked with 80 children from City Camp and provided the neighborhood kids with more activities and projects than ever before (we purchased a Connectix "Quick Cam"and started experimenting with having the drop-in kids make their own web pages. We also increased our adult day classes and continued to work with a handful of teenagers.

In retrospect, it's hard to believe that we accomplished this with one lab (six MacintoshLC IIIs) and a handful of computers in the drop-in center. With the increased use of the equipment, technical problems grew in number and complexity. We spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting equipment and finding ways "around" problems- we became very good at finding alternatives to using a complete lab (six networked machines) to teach computer projects. Dave Panush (our Summer intern) was a tremendous help and also a constant source of good humor. His insight into our work was: "expect anything to happen, the computers will break down a lot. Be ready for a class with 17 students (instead of 8), be ready when groups arrive late, be ready if the kids are not picked up on time. Above all, be ready when the kids want to hug you because you are their computer teacher."

This was also the Summer we stopped teaching our storytelling projects at The Boys and Girls Clubs. By the Spring of '95, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain the level and quality of service at the "remote" facilities. Focusing most of our attention on growing our services and managing our new building while disconnected from the day-to-day activities at the clubs made it difficult for us to coordinate our efforts. However, we continued offering the C Programming classes there through Hacker's U.

In the Fall, we hired two additional staff (Public Allies) to support the expansion of the drop-in center hours and our new after school program (Community Kids). By December of '95, we increased our hours of operation from 12 to 70.