Technology Club (AKA The Derp Gang)
We call ourselves the Derp Gang because sometimes we get a little derpy, (Making dumb mistakes.) It’s actually a lot of fun hanging out together. We started hanging out during recess and eating lunch together last year playing our own version of Dungeons and Dragons. After our four month long campaign was over, we started to look at building our own computers from boxes of parts.
We built our first computer and called it “the Doge” after a cute and silly dog that’s popular on the internet.
We’ve been very busy building our 3D printer from a kit the school bought for us. It took six hours to build and the instructions were very poorly written but it was a lot of fun once it was finished.
We also were given a gaming Graphics card or GPU to build a computer fast enough to run a very accurate simulation of ancient Egypt.
We configured our own print server on the network. We updated the firmware and onboard server software so the entire school could see it on the network. We also configured our own router and created our own wireless network.
We toured the building server room and telecommunications room. We saw the fiber-optic cables go into our adaptive security appliance, then our managed switches and all the servers and filtering appliances before it went to individual computers.
We learned about how the Internet works by watching a series of videos with Vint Cerf himself explaining his co-invention of TCP/IP.
We tested all of our hardware with a boot disk that tests RAM and disks and benchmarks processors.
We configuring the BIOS of a donated gaming motherboard installed in a surplus, rack-mounted server enclosure. This computer is now our adaptive security appliance (ASA.) (Again, thanks Rev. Clausen for the motherboard!) (Thanks UConn Surplus for the case.)
We didn’t get pictures of everything we did, like the steam engine. Largely because we didn’t want to set he smoke alarm off so filming was out of the question while running it outside.
We look forward to many cool projects for the remainder of the year including building a bicycle and experimenting with different gears, crank lengths and the different rolling resistances of different tires.
