Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 29, 1993 TAG: 9304290226
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
They could have gotten paid. They could have had $1,500, to be exact - to be split among 16 Virginia Tech students and one recent graduate.
The group is teaching basic computer skills to fifth-graders at Margaret Beeks Elementary School.
But they have declined money for their services, choosing to spend it instead on upgrading the kids' computers.
James "Jamie" Evans, Tech's computer facilties director, can imagine how it must have hurt.
"I've been a student, too," he said, "and I know how sometimes you have to have a part-time job just to make ends meet."
"I'm real proud of them," said Sandra Birch, the university's adviser for the project.
The project, in which the Tech students spend a few hours a week helping fifth-graders develop computer skills, began in February.
The idea dates from a year ago, when Evans looked into the computer training offered in Blacksburg's elementary schools.
He had a personal interest. His daughter, Summer, soon will enter kindergarten.
Evans found that schoolchildren use computers in their first-grade reading program - Margaret Beeks has 18 computers for that purpose - but seldom use them again until middle school, five years later.
Evans decided that wasn't good enough. His colleagues at Tech agreed to work with him to introduce more computers into the classrooms - and school principals were happy to get the help.
They started with a single school, Birch said, using some Apple computers that had been donated to Tech. Tech lent them to fifth-grade classrooms at Margaret Beaks and found student volunteers to teach the children to use them.
Tech also had a $1,500 grant from the Mobil Corp., which it decided to use for the project, Birch said.
That might have meant tutoring wages for the students.
But there also was the fact that the computers they had lent were equipped only with antiquated floppy discs - a slower and more cumbersome technology than the newer hard drives.
Soooo.
"I told the [Tech] students, `We can use it for you, or we can use it for them,' " Birch said.
The students chose to buy hard drives.
"As college students, we can always use the money," explained Tech student Mark McDavid. But he also said of the fifth-graders: "We wanted them to have the best technology possible."
Birch said the Tech students spend a couple of hours a week in preparation and teaching.
Why did they choose to work with fifth-graders?
"They're old enough to know what you're talking about, but not old enough to know that they don't want to listen to it," McDavid suggested.
There are other reasons. By the fifth grade, Birch said, students' skills begin to vary widely, depending on who has access to a computer at home. "This is an area where the `haves' get ahead, and the `have nots' lag behind," she said.
School officials said the pilot program, which they hope will expand to other schools, has worked well. "It has definitely generated some excitement," said fifth-grade teacher Deborah Snellings.
If animated faces spell success, the program is a winner.
In Snellings' class, fifth-graders Christine Diffell, Abby Carter and Jana Schubert, and Tech student Tonya Zajac, all crowded around a single computer on a recent afternoon.
Using a program the Tech students designed, the fifth-graders were drawing a computer picture of a dolphin leaping from the ocean.
The girls also are writing a play on the computer, based on a book they'd read in class, they said.
Have they learned a lot?
Yes, said Diffell. "I have an IBM at home. I've never worked with a Macintosh."
Carter, too, has a computer at home.
Neither girl is planning a career in computer technology yet, however. Carter is interesting in running a zoo.
As for Diffell, "I want to work in Colonial Williamsburg," she said. "I don't know if that has anything to do with computers, though."
Diffell thinks students in her class who don't own computers now know as much about using them as those who do, thanks to the Tech program.
by CNB