Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Enquiries: the demand is obviously there

For the last few weeks since the media stories about The Lab in The Age, local papers and more recently ABC Radio, I have been receiving a steady stream of enquries from parents about The Lab. This is noteworthy because none of the stories had our contact details - people have found out about us and contacted us independently. I would say that I have had an average of one enquiry a day. The Lab now has a waiting list of 12 - enough for another group or two already. I've received enquiries from Melbourne, the Sunshine Coast, Perth, Tasmania, and one from the US. I think we're definitely onto something important here.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Trying to get sponsorship so we can get the kids new laptops

One issue we had on Thursday was the participants computers.
Half of them crashed running programs like minecraft or spore(including one of our dells), which are not very intense games. They would have no chance of running something like Opensim. Not many of them were actually capable of running two screens either. Very few if any of them would be capable of doing something like video editing. Most looked like old work laptops from a parent.
The laptops we have are on their last legs. Two crash regularly.
One other issue with us helping was that many of the PCs were running XP or vista, meaning that for on young person it took us half an hour to get her computer online(we still don't know why) and for many others using the dual screen or installing software was more painful than it could be.

Today I contacted the following companies asking them for support;

  1. NEC
  2. IBM
  3. Fujitsu
  4. Steelseries
  5. Razor
  6. Dick Smith
  7. Harvey Norman
  8. Apple
  9. Asus
  10. Officeworks
  11. Pioneer Computers
  12. Logitech

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Our first official session - success

On Thursday we held our first official session.
We were expecting 8 kids, we got 7, a couple couldn't make it because of the torrential rain, and we got one extra younger brother.
We were lucky enough to have ABC radio come along and cover the event live, a podcast of this is online here.
All of the young people seemed to have a good time, many ended up playing minecraft together, they also played spore, and one young lady started to learn web design.
All of the parents and participants seemed very positive about proceedings.

Our website is also finally online at http://www.thelab.org.au.

Here is the room finally in action.