Any high school students or recent graduates here?

[aswedc]

I was just wondering how many high school students we have here on Anandtech and whether our technology program sucks as much as I think it does . So if you go to high school, please post:

School Name and Location
Grade
How is the technology in your school?
Other comments...

I'll start. I'm a sophmore at Unionville High School in Kennett Square, PA. We have an iMac for every teacher and about 30 of them in the library (about 300mhz). There are two Dell (about 366mhz) PC labs and a new iMac lab (400mhz?). We have two computer courses, Windows Software Applications and C++. The tech staff is generally very lazy and not knowledgeable at all. The only reason we have so much stuff is because we are one of the richest school districts in southern PA. Every iMac is outfitted with 32MB and Netscape 4 which makes browsing the web ridiculously slow. The webpage is a disgrace (http://www.uhs.ucf.k12.pa.us). Its served of a iMac and goes down every other day. The district won't let students help at all. I'm currently developing a web site for the school newspaper (http://www.uhs.ucf.k12.pa.us/ipost/), but their server won't serve anything but static HTML. (BTW, check it out and tell me what you think ) So does my school really suck or can you not expect much more out of a public HS?

 

[Mungla]

Kingfisher High School - Kingfisher, Ok
I am a Junior
Pretty good - although they give us basically no budget in CS.

In the high school alone, we have 3 full labs that contain 30 computers each. The newest lab, which is the business department, recently got a $30k donation to build 30-35 P3-866's with 40GB 7200RPM HD's and ex.. There's also a lab which our English classes share, which contains a mix of 30 P2-350's and 800MHz T-Birds (that we built). The oldest lab, which got the old business dept. computers has about 25 Pentium computers. In the classrooms, most teachers have either a Pentium or a Pentium II system. In our CS room, we have about a million 486's that we have scrapped for parts and HD's, 2 PIIs, 2 AMD K6-2 350's, and 1 866MHz T-Bird.

You can check out our website at Kingfisher Schools .. We have a small webteam, two everyday people, and we work on the site during 7th period in our newspaper class. Our newspaper, called the Stinger, puts out a 16-20 page paper every week. Besides just the newspaper and webteam, we also are joined by the school photographers as well. This classroom is very special, in the far corner there is a door. Inside the door is a small hallway, which is where another door is at. Through that door you'll find one of Oklahoma's most advanced photgraphy dark rooms. Somewhere in the top 5 in dark rooms I believe. It's even better than all but a couple of the states universities. Needless to say, we have about 30 people in-and-out of that classroom during that period.

Visit the site and check out the picture gallery. Under the "Stinger" category, you'll see picture of the classroom and newspaper staff working. I haven't had time to add pictures of myself or the darkroom yet. We just got a new 3.4MP Olympus digital camera, which is very sweet. We also have 2 - 2.1MP cameras, one of which writes directly to mini-CD.

 

[BeauJangles]

I'm a junior at The Commonwealth School in Boston, MA. We have about 140 people in the school. What technology department? You mean the nine 900 mhz Dells we have that don't work?The ones they won't let me fix them, even though all that is wrong with them is they have bad Powersupplies? Yeah, our technology department is awsome.. Just last year the fastest machine in our lab was a 166 mhz Pentium.

We still have ISDN to top it all off. Remote desktop works ok when everyone else is in class I guess the technology is OK now, but still we could use some better stuff. Those 900 mhz machines would be good if they WORKED. The school is too incompetant to call Dell and get someone over there (actually I think, finally, the guy is coming tonight to fix it). Other then that...

We have one computers teacher who teaches Data Structures & Algorithms, and Java Programming.

Oh, here is a linkyto my school's homepage.

 

[duragezic]

Escanaba High School, Escanaba
11th
Crap

Got the library with a bunch of macs that crash every 5 minutes, another lab with macs, some english classes with like 4-6 macs each, and every teacher gets a mac. So yah macs up the ass basically. But then over at this "Intermediate School District" which has some 2 hour classes that HS students takes they got PC Tech and CAD. All PCs over there. I think most of the PC tech ones are 667mhz+ PCs. I don't know though cause I didn't take pc tech since it's easy pointless crap that I knew for years.

All you other guys talk about programming classes and networking and stuff in HS! Like I said, the closest we'd have is PC tech at that other little school thing next door to the high school but all people do in there is play LAN games. There's only like keyboarding and computer apps (a million word/excel assignments) at the school...

 

[brandonl]

Junior and go to Brentwood Christian in Austin. Not a super richy school like others here ... we got one lab with about 30+ IBM 400 Celerys with like 92 RAM each. Each teacher has their own system which is roughly another 40+ then there is a Journalism room which I think is mainly old 233s ... they might have got new IBMs but I'm not sure. Elementary has a bunch of Macs me thinks ... never go there so i don't know. And to top it off ... they are all on a DSL. *sigh*

 

[MustPost]

We have an imac or G3 for pretty much every teacher. Then we have about 20 computers in the library, two or three computer labs with about 25-30 comps each. And some more computers in Random places. All macs, used to have about 2 PCs but they got ride of them. The speed of the computers could be worse(for macs) but the network is really slow. Its not the internet connection because its really slow when I try to use the server located at school. I think we have a pretty good internet connection, just the intranet is saturated.

 

[TonyG]

I am a Sophmore, and we do have a decent technology system, though I would not call it great by any means. I am in the C++ class which hasn't been taught for several years though has been offered for several years, its just that there have never been enough people sign up. The teacher in there just learned C++ over the summer so it is kind of a learning experience for him to. The school districts websights are pretty much created and updated by the students. I have no idea what the severs are, though the school ordered a bunch of PIII compaqs a couple years back and I have literally seen one smoke in class. We have several different 3D programming/designing classes, along with business computer systems classes. The big plus for our school is that a local computer company here, LEK Technologies, offers a class about computers through them, it takes two periods and can be taken your Junior and Senior year, with two levels of the classes. We also have a computer department setup just for CAD designing, along with a blue print printer, prints full size blue prints. The computers in the class rooms are all old, probably pentium class, they almost all are AT style with serial mice. Letting the students open a computer up, well lets just say that we would be in a very deep deep pile of poop. The school has hired an outside group to block unwanted internet sites, though that is just a very big pain. Not only are we blocked from almost all online games, the same server is used to block internet sites that the schools don't want second graders to have access to, which means that we are also blocked out of them, even if needed for research projects. Ok, I will stop complaining about that internet server.

Oh, and hear is our website http://www.canyonisd.net

 

[wiredspider]

Howard High School of Technology
Wilmington, DE (small little place, but MBNA got the main HQ here)
I'm in 10th grade.
Technology is pretty good here, well at least in the LAN labs.
We recently got some new black Dells. Something like 900 p3s, 256 mb ram, each of them had had two 20 gig hard drive, but we have two LAN classes so we split them, each student has their own 20 gig hard drive in a removable bay. Dual video cards, modem, nic, and 19" flat screen(not panel, but still nice) monitors).
We have a classroom setup of laptop with the wireless nics and everything. In one of my english classes we have like old 486s though, lol. Only have like 32 mb ram. They tried to block our internet access, like we would want to surf on those crappy things. (I did figure a way around it, not to play online, to mail my english work to myself so I can finish it at home)

 

[Redwingsguy]

Rochester Adams High (Madonna's college)
11th
crap last year, stupendiously good this year

3 labs of 30 some computers each,:

Dell P4 1.4ghz
256meg ECC RDRAM
20gig HDD

 

[Ryan]

Mosley Hich School, Panama City, FL
12
Technology is Great!

We have 2600 kids at my school

Technology in my school is great. This year, many teachers are receiving Smart Boards (link), many of the school clubs have their own websites, We got all new computers last year - they are made by a local computer maker (Dynasty Tech.), and they are all the same (P3-700, 128mb ram, WIn2K). The computer teachers all have new P4 dell's. We have a TV system in the school which is run by computers in our Television Dept. We also have 2 TV programs that come on in the morning (principal, class prez talk about important school stuff), and afternoon (School clubs, activities, box office reports, music charts, etc). We have many computer courses: business application classes, photoshow classes, internet technologies, frontpage - 1 and 2, Programming 1 and 2, Java and Perl - 1 and 2, and next year we are starting a class where you actually learn how to build a computer. YOu get college credit for any computer course you take at school, credits go to our local college, also. No macs. Each class has two computer - and all attendance, and grades are taken through the computers. All of our computer are networked to each other, and to the internet. Video editing is done through video workstations. All in all - I think our school is very advanced. BTW - I go to a public high school. We have 6 labs with over 30 computers

 

[wfbberzerker]

Whitefish Bay HS, Whitefish Bay WI
Sophmore

Just this summer we upgraded most of the computers to P3 933's (We have 3 computer labs, with about 30 computers in each, not to mention a computer in every room for the teacher). All computers are running... win98 i think.
check out our site here.

edit - that smartboard thing is awesome as hell!

 

[Mungla]

The smart boards are pretty sweet. Our school got two of them last year, they're like $7k apiece for the ones we got. Try playing internet games on those bad boys! We got a kick out of playing golf on candystand last year.