Digital Community Center

To build a non-profit community center to teach computer, electronic and engineering skills to kids as well as foster a community of makers. Inspired by hacker spaces and The Pirate Store.

Levels

Students will earn levels by taking classes and through 1-1 learning. Levels both act as a motivator as well as helping keep order. A student needs to reach a certain level to have access to equipment. If they have some sort of a badge, they can just hang it on what ever equipment they're using to show that they have access to it.

Volunteers

We will need many generic volunteers to help keep order. Running the store, making sure no one is accessing things they haven't earned yet and enforcing general behavior. We'll have to look into rules and regulations for unsupervised kids. I would like to make the center open enough that kids can just show up, but that may be too big a liability.

At a higher level, we'll need people with basic knowledge to answer questions and help kids with projects. We will probably only need one or two of these at any time. After a little while, we'll also be able to leverage advanced students and entice them with perks for helping out other students.

We will need people to teach classes. And to mentor kids.

= Computers

Teach kids general computing, building computers and programming. We can have an AWS account, giving us quick access to

Electronics

Teach students basic electronics. Bread-boarding, soldering. The main focus here will be having a lot of basic equipment needed to get started - meters, oscilloscopes, soldering stations. The stations should be divided into levels.

Places

There will have to be several internal spaces for specific activities.

Computer Lab

A few physical computers, some laptops that can be rented and some desks where students can set down their own laptops.

The Boneyard

Have people and businesses donate old electronics. We can pull parts out of these, especially things like motors.

Ciruit Store

We will also keep some things stocked that can be bought - solder, perf board, RasPi, Arduino, solder kits. We can also try to stock things like refurb'd Eee's.

Perks

To inspire kids, I would like to setup a number of perks.

• Dedicated server space and sub-domain: We'll have a few AWS servers that are always on and once kids reach a certain level of computer proficiency, they can have their own user account and sub-domain on one of them. This allows them to set up their own web page and learn some development.
• Big Computer: We can build one beast of a machine with 6 screens and some cool accessories. Students have to reach a certain level to get an account on that machine and they have to schedule time to use it. We could also put some games on it and reserve very specific times that students can play them. Game time could serve as a reward system.
• Free solder: It's cheap, the only reason we wouldn't want to give it away at first is that some students may be tempted to melt it into one large blob.