Volume 2. No 1 Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis October 1993

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Kids Compute on Campus

by Catherine Curran, Planning, Strategy & Administration

This summer, the Division of Information Technology teamed forces with Cal Aggie Kids Sports Camp to show nearly 300 six- to twelve-year-olds how computing is used on campus.

On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, children enrolled in Cal Aggie Kids Sports Camp traded kickballs for keyboards as they were treated to a first-hand look at campus computing facilities.

"We wanted each child to have a good understanding of how a computer works," said Pete Peterson, who coordinated the program for IT and made sure all campers toured the Center for Advanced Information Technology (CAIT) in Shields Library and had an opportunity to work on both Macintosh and IBM computers.

The computing experiences provided during each of the camp's four two-week sessions were many and varied. Campers created their own name tags and designed paper airplanes with desktop publishing. They found out what the term multimedia can mean when they participated in video conferences, experimented with QuickTime videos and queried image databases for photographs and graphics. They journeyed into different computing networks with e-mail, and some campers even looked into current events by accessing Usenet news.

Information Resources instructors for Kids Camp were Jennifer Koester, Peter Peterson, Jeff Barrett, Faust Gorham, and Jen Alex. Tina Perez, Donna Wilson and Dave Zavatson provided instructional assistance.

When campers were asked how they liked the computing program, they didn't mince their words.

"It's fun," they said.