Welcome to the CPESS Tech Scouts Home Page

The Tech Scouts is a technology class offered within the Senior Institute of Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS). We meet four times a week to explore the world of computers. What follows is a student account of our first semester, written and formatted for the web by the students of the course.

Class Description: First Semester

This technology class started out as a pilot project to enhance student computer experience for a wide range of ability levels. We have people in class like me who are novices and just starting to be familiar with functions and terms, and others who are " computer gurus", or people whom are experts. Some people are exploring Hyperstudio, a program which helps with drawing and designing clickable representations of places. Others are installing programs such as Microsoft Word and Writenow, and there are others making Web pages.

Through out the course of the class we are becoming experts in chosen areas. As experts we are designing "Merit badges", which describes the skills and purposes of the technologies which interested us. We are learning these skills for the benefit of other students and teachers at CPESS. This class is a self taught class where we design what we want to learn and the teachers Bram and Joe simply tell us where to look for what we want to do. Other than that students are the ones who help each other.

In order for us to show our knowledge and the value of the skills we developed as we earned our "merit badges" we are designing a "Cyberfair" where students show their acquired skills to teachers and their peers. By us showing and defending our skills we demonstrate our expertise in that certain area while simultaneously teaching others.