Mississippi Students Build Their Own
PC'sBy MICHEL
MARRIOTT
 ACKSON, Miss. -- NOT long ago, TiAndrea Beasley would
no sooner have plunged her hands into the electronic guts of a
personal computer than she would have stuck her head under a
car's hood to change the spark plugs. But that was before
TiAndrea, a 17-year-old high school senior, enrolled in a
computer engineering technology class at her school in Port
Gibson, Miss., a small rural town about 50 miles southwest of
Jackson.
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Now TiAndrea, a B-plus student who plans to study business
and accounting after she graduates next year, can install the
operating system on any computer she builds in less than a
half-hour.
"You know it's a man's thing, but women are doing it," she
said as her computer beeped in the background. Then, grinning
half in jest toward her computer construction partner, Sarah
Reynolds, another 17-year-old senior, she added, "Building
computers is easy."
TiAndrea and Sarah were among about a dozen students busy
in the school's computer instruction classroom, which for at
least three hours a day, Monday through Friday, has of late
been a homespun computer assembly plant. And while every eye
and hand in the room appeared sure with microprocessors and
motherboards, all the students, including the boys, confessed
that before taking the course they had never imagined
themselves building computers with less sweat than it takes to
build a fire.
Add another 39 senior high schools across the state that
are similarly training students to build computers, and the
scope of an unparalleled statewide plan begins to emerge.
TiAndrea and Sarah said they couldn't be more proud to be a
part of the mission: building about 6,000 computers so that
every Mississippi classroom will have an online computer by
the end of 2002.
"It is a joyful thing," said Lee A. Howard, 52, the
instructor of the Port Gibson computer class and a former shop
teacher, as he watched his students cranking out computers so
that others could use them. "I was going to retire before this
came around. This really rejuvenated me."
The statewide effort had its climax on Dec. 11, when 125
Mississippi high school students, some of whom had ridden for
hours from tiny towns in minibuses, arrived in Jackson for
what organizers called a Blitz Build: a single day in which
scores of computers are built from scratch at a single
location. The day's labors at Jackson State University
produced the last 275 computers needed to fulfill the state's
classroom needs.
Among those who gathered to mark the occasion was Gov.
Ronnie Musgrove, who shortly after his election two years ago
set a goal of having an Internet-connected computer in every
public-school classroom in the state by the end of 2002. That
accomplishment would be a first for any state, according to
the National Governors Association in Washington - and an
uncommon distinction for Mississippi, whose public education
system has for years ranked near or at the bottom in most
national assessments.
Wiring of all 30,000 classrooms for the Internet should be
complete by the governor's deadline, educators said. The
larger hurdle at the outset was obtaining computers for the
6,000 classrooms that still lacked them. Officials said the
state could not afford to buy that many through conventional
means.
Through a combination of luck, timing and the determination
of a few technology activists, Governor Musgrove became
acquainted with ExplorNet, a nonprofit educational
organization based in North Carolina that trains teachers to
instruct students in building personal computers. In May,
Governor Musgrove enlisted ExplorNet as a major component of
his Computers in the Classroom initiative.
With the help of a $4.4 million grant administered by the
Mississippi Development Authority that was used mostly to buy
components, teams of students began building computers in
July, with many working through the summer for $8 an hour.
The students spent the first nine weeks of the course
studying computer terminology, how computers function and how
best to work with them, said Andrew L. Smith, director of
ExplorNet in Mississippi. Each student was given a basic tool
kit, but a standard screwdriver is what most of them used.
Much of the work involved correctly connecting and inserting
10 major components, including the main circuit board, into a
computer case.
The kits, which include fully assembled 15-inch monitors,
cost the organizers $685 a piece, roughly half what the state
was paying its vendors, Mr. Smith said. Each computer has a
1,000-megahertz microprocessor, a 40-gigabyte hard drive, a
high-speed CD-ROM drive and a network card, and uses the Microsoft
Windows 98 operating system.
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