Mentor for Detroit public school uses gaming club as mentoring tool; needs monitor donations
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
Saw this post on Reddit this morning and it hit home pretty hard. If we, as a community, want to donate a monitor or two to this guy, it would be super cool. I have one I'm donating already but I'm willing to be the local coordinator for others (if you want to ship one, I'll deliver it, etc.).
Salient points since the post is super long:
I run a video game club at Cass Tech. Right as attendance peaks for the club I shut down all the games and socializing to have serious, 15 minute, conversations with the entire membership about a variety of life lessons. These lessons include topics such as: how to set achievable goals, what are successful time management strategies, good ways to say no to friends who want you to neglect school responsibilities, effective conflict resolution strategies, self-confidence building, recently we've had a few weeks with the theme of dealing with depression, etc.
I think video gaming clubs have a huge potential to be a modern-day vector for mentoring, and keeping kids engaged in schooling. From my experience the narrative that video games are bad for schooling doesn't hold much water, and it is through their passionate interest of gaming that I have found room to really connect and inspire these young adults.
The club is getting quite big, and we have plenty of students who are allowed to, and willing to, bring in their gaming systems. Typically the students only own the older systems, but as the year has progressed we've been getting more newer ones as families and students have saved up for the newer systems. The real bottleneck right now is monitors/TVs we can use. The monitors DPS has for our computers do not have HDMI ports (Almost all of them only have VGA ports..., and the ones that do have HDMI ports are chained and locked to the desk they sit on), so we cannot use those for the club. Currently, between the monitors students bring in, and the stuff I've provided, we only have 4 monitors/TV and a projector. This is quickly becoming inadequate with the rising number of students. Further perpetuating the problem is that our seniors are about to leave us, and since some of them own the monitors we've been using, we're already seeing a problem where the students are bringing in their stuff ready to play, but we don't have anything for them to play it on. So, this has lead me to ask you friendly folks at /r/Detroit to see if anyone here is willing to donate a monitor/TV with HDMI, to me.
Comments
I think I have one that no one bit on at work and actually has an HDMI port. I'll double-check.
What is the current price point for these? Perhaps a donation system for those of us further away?
I'd also chip in cash moneys.
Did me, @BuddyJ, @Chip, or @Ghaleon4 ever tell you about Clan Beowulf? That's where the *BW* in my folding name came from. Short version is that it was a Quake gaming clan started by a psychologist in Oklahoma as part of his treatment strategy. I'm now pretty fuzzy on the details, but I want to say it was a socialization technique. By the time we joined in the Quake 2 era, it had evolved beyond that into a larger group oriented more along rocket launchers and hookshots (Lithium mod best mod). Even so, the clan was heavily influenced by his leadership, and the member conduct was far above average for these kind of things. I've been convinced of gaming as a positive influence for a long time
This monitor is sans HDMI, but does have VGA and dvi, which should be present on modern graphics cards still. I can bring it over during travels next week
Sorry, I'm not sure if I mentioned, but he needs HDMI monitors only because these are for consoles.
Thanks though!
Oh man consoles? Geez those poor kids.
Brian, what's the support on consoles for resolutions other than 720p and 1080p? Is hooking an 1024x768 monitor up via DVI->HDMI cable an option or do consoles offer shitty support for non-TV resolutions?
1024x768 won't do any good. Consoles are not set up for that stuff. Has to be 720p or 1080p.
Have they considered DonorsChoose.org?