Hawai'i tech
Learning a quick fix

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

St. Louis School junior Leo Erolin tries to figure out how to fix a PC. He and his tech teammates will compete in a computer-building race against other schools. Computer-building contest 5 p.m. Friday Gerber Field House, St. Louis High School 739-7777 Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

Ed Frank wrestled with the innards of another PC.

"This one has a bad CPU," he said. "And the motherboard is really old, so we couldn't find a replacement."

Lesson No. 607 in the Technical School of Hard Knocks: You can count on computer hardware to give you a hard time.

Erolin is a junior and Frank a freshman at St. Louis High School, and already each knows more about the guts of computers than most adults could teach them. They are members of the school's seven-month-old Tech Team.

The team will compete Friday in a race to construct new computers out of components bought online and at retail suppliers here: First one to load Windows 98 and connect the machine to the Internet wins, provided the judges determine the job was done cleanly.

This is a special event, but on an almost daily basis the students fix the school's computers.

"They're almost like little technicians, and some of them carry around their own tool kits,"said Lynn Horiuchi, the business teacher who serves as the team's faculty adviser. Some teachers needed convincing that kids should be "touching" or "breaking" the computers, but Horiuchi knew better.

"They love the computers," she said. The situation at St. Louis is becoming the rule, rather than the exception.

Public and private schools statewide have involved students as young as middle-schoolers, in the building and repair of computers. The state Department of Education offers training for an industry certification known as A-Plus, a prerequisite for hiring at an increasing number of companies, said Ryan Kusuda, tech coordinator and teacher at Kalani High School.

"The first year, we had two students," he said. "That number has just exploded. This year, we have 27 students A-Plus certified."

It's computer repair that's the primary challenge for a student, not new construction, Kusuda added.

"Building a computer is easy," he said. "Troubleshooting is a whole other animal. You just need a manual in front of you to build one, but when things aren't working right, to be able to figure out what's wrong, that's the key."

A-Plus is one of the tech tracks available through E-Academy, a program to create "magnet schools" in technology education, said Diana Oshiro, assistant superintendent of teacher and school support.

Fifteen high schools and six middle schools are now part of the academy; so are two elementary schools, but there the emphasis is on teaching software, not hardware, Oshiro said.

The department expected students to take a semester to complete a course of certification training, she said, but teachers and officials were stunned to see students passing the test after only a month of classes.

"We didn't realize that if we had focused attention on instruction that we would have this kind of speed," Oshiro said.

Discoveries like these have been made all over the state. Bill Wicking, a former Damien High School teacher and still the school's consultant tech coordinator, said Damien was one of the first schools to involve students in computer repair, taught through science courses.

In general, private schools have not trained students in computer building and repair to the same extent as public schools, said Wicking, whose post with the Maui High Performance Computing Center puts him in touch with public and private schools where he does educational outreach.

"Public schools are doing a lot more hands-on computer repair work," he said. "They're less well funded in the infrastructure than the private schools, and they get computers donated by organizations... many private schools have to their detriment shied away from vocational education.

"Educators always saw computer science as learning a computer language, not computer repair or networking or building a web page. Schools are coming around on that one, too."

Tech education also has bridged the gender gap in the sciences. At La Pietra Hawaii School for Girls, instruction focuses more on software than hardware, said teacher Novine Schlapfer, but there is a networking class in which students disassemble computers and study the components relevant in setting up computer networks.

"It has inspired a lot of girls," she said. "Two girls told me they want to build their own computer for a project."

This is one field where students are teaching the teachers. Jean Tsuda, who heads the E-Academy program for the state, said high-school pupils have assisted their teachers in training other faculty members so that the academy can expand to more schools.

The student technicians also are performing a service to the school, of course. At St. Louis, students are claiming those hours to fulfill their annual requirement for 20 hours of community service, Horiuchi said; others can earn an elective half-credit after 60 hours of repair work.

"We had a full-time MIS (management information systems) person last year," she said. "But one person cannot service 150 computers.

"They," she said, waving toward her students, "are so talented."