Teenager Challenge - 2006

I left San Jose on Monday after completing my work at the 9-day forum on technology. It was challenging, rewarding, frustrating, and exhilarating - much like my work with Peace Corps. The hours were too long to count - from early morning until late night and sometimes the hours in between.

On Sunday, I met my group of 25 students. They each came in to register with me, so I got to talk to them individually for a few minutes. There were 22 boys and 3 girls, all between 15 and 18. They were from all over the country - the world actually, since there was one student from Korea. Another of the students was from Tipton, IA - the small-town home of my good friend Tina. And one was from Virginia, only an hour away from me.

It became quickly apparent that although these kids were supposed to be computer nerds, they were going to be a handful. In actuality, I should have seen this as a good thing. They were all fairly well-adapted and not nearly as socially awkward as I remember myself being at that age. They were also smart, funny, and interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, that's all they wanted to do. Talk. All the time. In the middle of group activities. In the middle of lessons. In the middle of my sentences. It didn't matter. They were talking. Or (as pictured), they were testing their boundaries. This was the last day when one of them dragged his air mattress to our tech talk room. I let them get away with it.

Having had no experience working with high school students, I made the mistake of trying to be their friend instead of their teacher. After 4 or 5 days of being unable to control their jabbering, I finally had to lay down the law. I implemented the conch shell for a session on respecting each other and fixing our group dynamic. For those of you who've read Lord of the Flies, you understand the conch shell concept. It keeps order in a group, because only the person holding the shell is allowed to speak. I used a roll of tape, but it was the same concept.

Things improved a little bit after that, although I still lost my patience a few times. But as the kids got to spend more time with each other outside of our sessions, they had less to talk about inside our sessions. It also helped that we introduced Future Solutions, a group project not unlike the science fair that got them interested in working together. We had the Expo on Sunday, and one of my groups even made it to the Top 3 in their category, but ultimately lost.

The conference was about 90% boys, so the girls who attended seemed to have a good time fending them off. All of my girls were pretty and popular, and each appeared to strike up a special friendship with one of the guys in the group.

Unfortunately, things ended with a bit of a sour note when one of my students was dismissed from the conference on the last day. I won't say any more about that, except to repeat the official stance of my organization. He made a very poor decision.

In the meantime, we had some pretty cool speakers, seminars, and site visits. With 1200 students, it's impossible to take all of them to their first choices for industry sites. Half of them want to go to Google, and they don't even know why. So students were split into groups of about 50-100 to visit different places, and we the faculty advisors were also split. I went to two universities and an industry site.

The first visit was a disaster. Four faculty advisors including me escorted 100 students to San Jose State University, walking distance from where we were staying. Unfortunately, the university forgot we were coming. There was no one there to greet us, and we were unable to reach our points of contact. We entertained the students for half an hour, while diligent Dawn called everyone she could think of. Finally our speaker arrived, but was obviously unprepared. After the talk, we were supposed to have four tour guides taking groups of 25 around the campus. But the college could only scrounge up two guides, neither of whom knew anything about our conference. Our guide seemed to think that these kids were all prospective students, so she walked them around saying, "This is where you'll take psychology. This is where you'll take math." And my favorite: "This is the student health center where you can be issued up to four free condoms a day."

The next day went much better. We went to NVIDIA, a company highly regarded for its graphics processors. I had no clue who they were, so it baffled me that so many students were excited to go. Then I found out they made the X-Box. And their chip will be used in the Playstation 3. After getting a tour of the facilities, they gave us snacks and free T-shirts. I saw students wearing them at dinner that night, and some of them hardly took theirs off for the rest of the conference. Mine is a large, so it doesn't even fit. But I have enough geek friends that I'm sure I can find a worthy recipient.

On the third day, I went to Santa Cruz University with 150 students and 6 faculty advisors. They gave us a tour of their engineering labs and had several current students talk about the program. It was really interesting, and I think the kids enjoyed it.

We also had three days of plenary speakers. Two out of three were excellent. On the first day, we had Bob Rice, Tommy Tallarico, and Jack Wall - all pioneers in the music for video games industry. They were fantastic presenters. Two of them invented a concert series called "Video Games Live", an interactive experience featuring the best video game music over the decades. I don't even play video games, and I want to see it!

Our best speaker was Blake Ross, the 21-year old cofounder of Firefox Web Browser. He started volunteering to code for the Mozilla Project when he was in his early teens, and got hired on by Netscape before he could drive. He was really funny and gave the students a different perspective on the world of technology. I immediately felt guilt for having been too lazy up until that point to actually download Firefox. But I have corrected the error. And it's way cooler than Internet Explorer. SPREAD FIREFOX!

I'm now in Carson City spending a few more days with Dad and Karen before returning to Virginia. It was so nice getting the chance to work again, especially in the non-profit realm. I made very little money, but I felt good about what I was doing!