Sunday, January 3, 2010

A duo, Curtis Lewis and Tommy Gooden, from Excelsior etched its name in the record books by building a computer system at lightening speed at the recent Teens for Technology conference held over the Christmas holidays.

The December 21, 2009 event, held at the Girl Guides headquarters on Waterloo Road in Kingston, was the inaugural conference of the Teens for Technology unit in Jamaica. The record-breaking duo attended the teen technology conference along with students from other high schools.

The two main events of the conference were a quiz competition and a computer building competition. The conference brought together the students of different high schools in the name of technological advancement.

Despite Camperdown High taking the gold in the buzzer round, it was Excelsior who outshone all the other teams, building a computer system from scratch and then booting it up in eight minutes and 26 seconds.

Depending on their own ingenuity, with no outside help in putting their system together, the two-man team was forced to fix a bug that was deliberately placed in the Operating System by officials to make the exercise more challenging.

Since 2002, TFT has donated labs and computers to more than 400 schools in Jamaica. Each of their partner-schools receives a complete package, including hardware, software, a maintenance program and comprehensive training.

Teen for Technology (TFT) is a non-profit organization, founded by TEENs to help children in various countries acquire necessary technological skills and training. TFT works with community schools here in Jamaica, donating complete computer labs, including hardware, peripherals and educational software that will get this job done.

Based on story in the Jamaica Observer.