INSTRUCTIONAL COMPUTING INSTRUCTIONAL COMPUTING[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]
More than thirty young people from the New York area participated in this year's Summer Program in Computing for high-school students at NYU. They became skillful in using both Macintosh and DOS computers, and they used their temporary NYU-Internet accounts to navigate FTP and Gopher sites and the World-Wide Web, and to exchange electronic mail with teachers and students in the program, and with other young people in countries around the world.For more than twenty-five years, the Academic Computing Facility has hosted high-school students for a month-long session focusing on computers and computing. "As the nature of computing has changed," said Vincent Doogan, Associate Director for User Services at the ACF, "so has the nature of the summer program. At one time the emphasis was on programming alone. Now that computers are part of our daily lives, the summer program's emphasis has shifted from programming to using computers for writing, art and graphics, and communication." This year's students were instructed in software applications such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Director, and, of course, the World-Wide Web browsers Lynx and Netscape. They also became proficient in using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the language behind the Web.
This year's program was supported by both the School of Education and the Academic Computing Facility. Shirley Hanein coordinated the curriculum and managed the day-to-day activities for the School of Education. "This program is a natural match for Dean Ann Marcus's goals," she said. "Her commitment to public education in the New York area is well known. Some of these students have never used computers before. This program can make a real difference both to the students and to their schools." It is hoped that these skills learned this summer will be an asset to the teachers and classmates of their home schools.
Lee Frissell, Director of Field Projects for the School of Education, recruited students based on recommendations from school principals and district superintendents. Students came from high schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
The ACF's lab at 14 Washington Place, normally closed during the summer, was dedicated to the program for four weeks. The students began their days by checking their e-mail and catching up on their newsgroup postings, then set to work on their group or individual projects {http://www.nyu.edu/pages/highschool/}. They learned how to use the NYU-Internet account's mailer (Pine) and editor (Pico) and how to navigate the Internet using the account's menu interface. Learning to do online research was one of the major objectives of the program; the students used various Internet search engines, including Veronica and Archie, and took full advantage of Netscape's "Net Search" function to explore the World-Wide Web.
The resources at the ACF Education Building Lab made it possible for the students to scan photos and drawings, to use Photoshop to create and manipulate the images, and to integrate them in multimedia presentations.
This is the first time I've taught such a course, and I was astounded by the enthusiasm these young people had for learning and for using technology for creative pursuits. Not having taught this age group before, I was surprised at how much they knew about the Internet and computing in general, and how earnestly they worked on the sometimes tough concepts and problems they encountered. Even those who had had little prior experience with computers dove right in and were soon fully involved in the complexities of multiplatform Internet authoring. In fact, we who were teaching to course found we had to accelerate our planned curriculum to keep up with them.
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Posted 17 October 1995. Reviewed 20 May 2004.
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