New Year's Wishes

Our first class of the New year has taken place! This morning, 10 more kids came through our program! Our classes are getting close to being 50/50 boys and girls some days, and today was no exception. One little girl even figured out how to modify game backgrounds ahead of the rest of the class. I know this because she was bragging to her dad about it at the end of the class. Then, she asked if she could come back next week.

This is exactly what we were hoping to accomplish over 1 year ago when we started this crazy Museum thing: to inspire the next generation of game developers, and to help encourage all children to take up programming as a hobby and perhaps even career. Unfortunately, we're starting to butt up against a major problem that has been plaguing us since we opened our doors: we have a terrible computer lab for the students to use.

Our computers are all refugees from people's garages. We don't have a single classroom computer that's faster than 800 Mhz. While we can still teach the kids on these ancient machines, it's almost a fulltime job to keep these computers up and running. If they don't freeze due to aging, glitchy hardware, they're so slow that the kids can get distracted by long pauses.

If you're looking for a way to help us out in the New Year, please consider donating your old computer to the MADE. Any type of computer will work, as MIT's Scratch runs on all platforms. We also need keyboards and mice. We're fine on monitors for now, but it's gotten to the point where we're starting to have serious PC problems cropping up during class. Please help us to solve this problem. A donation of 10 old Office PC's in working condition would go a long way to improve our classroom experience.