Hawthorne Middle School Students Tap Global Computer Network

Students at Hawthorne Yukon Intermediate School are working on joint assignments with students in Siberia in a pilot computer project that will train them to navigate through the world of on-line computer systems.

By semester’s end, school officials say, the students also will search computer databases for copies of government documents, weather maps and space shuttle photos from NASA.

Project TREK (Telecommunications Reaching Every Kid) was launched at the beginning of the school year after three Yukon teachers spent much of last year learning to navigate the Internet, an on-line linking of computers worldwide, said district spokeswoman Sara Sellars.

Those teachers and 20 seventh- and eighth-graders are spending hours every day after school searching for information to use in class. They also correspond, via computer, with teachers and students from around the world, making their classrooms global learning centers, said science teacher Gil Mara.

Mara said he hopes to use the current group of cyberspace-literate students to train other students at the school. The ultimate goal, he said, is to have all students on-line by December.

The project, funded by a grant from Rockwell International Corp., is run on a mix of 15 older IBM and Apple computers in four classrooms on campus. But officials said that after the “dinosaur” computers were upgraded to handle the new technology, the 12- and 13-year-old students were eager to start talking with their peers around the world.

“We just started this, so we’re still taking baby steps here,” Mara said, but he added that many of his students are already making connections with youngsters in Australia, Europe and Africa through Kidlink, a program for 10- to 15-year-olds that reaches 23,000 students in 60 countries.

Although the students now spend much of their on-line time meeting other students, social studies teacher Scott Miller said more in-depth assignments will follow.

The project has captivated his students, Miller said. Because the computer occupies much of their time, discipline problems among his students have disappeared.

“I even have kids e-mailing me at home asking questions about their homework,” Miller said.

If the pilot project is successful, Sellars said, she hopes to bring Hawthorne Intermediate, the Hawthorne School District’s other middle school, on line in the coming years.