Extracurricular Information Technology was born out of my passion for I.T. Since my early childhood, I had always been interested in technology, often playing with computers and electronics in my free time. I would spend each free moment I had experimenting on the family computer. I was always curious, always wanting to create my own videos or websites. While my passion for technology initially started out with my father’s old IBM laptop, which he gave to me when I was five, it grew greater with each computer I got to use.
The Beginnings
In the second semester of ninth grade, I had noticed that while the school did provide an I.T. course, it was fairly basic and didn’t cover some of the more advanced topics of I.T. In an effort to further my knowledge and interest in technology, I began speaking to faculty members at the school I.T. department. I spoke to my I.T. professor, Mr. Feigert, and he further encouraged me to pursue my interests. I would often spend time after school in the IT office and lose track of time as I would speak to Jose, an I.T. technician about all the latest computer hardware. During lunch, I would spend time with friends discussing PC building and computer programming.\r\n\r\nSo with the start of the second semester I had decided it was time to turn those lunchtime discussions into something more. This led me to create my own after school activity that has met every Wednesday during my four years of high school. My goal was to foster an environment where others and I could share our passion for technology. It was in many ways an extension of my own hobby.
The Projects
While running the class, I tried to keep it highly interactive in an effort to encourage others, of all age and skill levels, to come up and share their ideas. The activity was run in a manner that involved teaching a certain amount of content, followed by examples and then a project to which everyone would contribute to. One such example was when I taught web development to the group. After spending several lessons spanning across several months teaching the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript I felt that the best way to summarize all of the content that we had learned was with a group project to bring everything together. I felt that the best project would not only combine all the skills that we had just learned, but one that would be both engaging and most importantly practical not only for the group but for the high school community. Thus I came to the conclusion that we would construct a Grade Point Average calculator from scratch. The calculator was not built ahead of time, but was built collaboratively in an open group session. Here is our completed product after we applied some CSS styling.
Over the course of these four years we have covered a wide variety of topics ranging from programming to network security, to design in Photoshop and computer hardware. To this day, technology plays a crucial role in my life and I continue to develop my skills in web development, online marketing and computer hardware.