High school-aged Upward Bound students learn computing skills in IET's computer labs.

Upward Bound works during the academic year to bring students to visit the UC Davis campus at least once a week to participate in training and advising activities; those who are especially committed are invited to attend a six-week long Summer Residential Program, which provides mentoring to the students as they stay in residence halls and attend classes amid a motivating college atmosphere.

Partnering with UC Davis, Upward Bound offered a Web design elective here on campus this summer, in which students learned the basics of HTML code. The course got off to a solid start with the help of Computer Lab Management (CLM), the IET unit that oversees all campus computer classrooms and labs. CLM provided a computer classroom, virtual space where students could save their work, and software that was previously unavailable on the classroom's computers, like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop. In addition, a CLM employee attended each class to handle any technical problems. Students in the course said this assistant, along with their instructor, James Cubbage, were very beneficial in assisting them with their projects.

David Iraheta, a student of Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, took the course in hopes that the experience will help him get into college and increase the number of skills that he can list as job qualifications.

"It's my only opportunity to learn this," Iraheta said.

The nation's problem of the digital divide continues to grow. For instance, the US Department of Commerce found that households with an income of $75,000 or higher are more than 20 times more likely to have access to the Internet and 9 times more likely to own a computer than those at the lowest income levels. In a survey by the FleetBoston group, 56 percent of inner city residents with a household income of $40,000 or less knew very little to nothing about the Internet; although 80% were willing to learn more if the opportunity were present.

For many young, motivated students, Upward Bound has presented the opportunity. Computer and Internet skills can provide college or career hunters a considerable advantage. In fact, 36 percent of Internet users who chose a school or college in the past two years say the Internet played a crucial role in that choice, and non-users are less likely to be employed than Internet users, according to PEWinternet.org, an Internet research group.

One of the obstacles that Cubbage had to hurdle while teaching his course was the fact that many of his students were completely unfamiliar with computers. As a result, he needed to teach them the very basics of computing before he could even begin to instruct them on the Web design component of the course. Even so, Cubbage said he is confident about the potential for these students to master both general computer competency and the creation of Web pages.

Even students without access to expensive Web-design software went home from the training sessions with the ability to test their new skills, since they learned to use Notepad, a program enabling them to create their own Web sites from any computer. The students even learned how to post their Web pages on the Internet for free. With these skills, Student Dean Ross of Vallejo High School is already one step closer to his plans for the future.

"I want to start my own business some day [and] make my own Web site," Ross said.

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