Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Alexa Ingram-Cauchi of Computer Adventures works with student Rachel Feruson on her basic Macintosh skills.

Local entrepreneurs start computer camp for kids

By Jeff Kearns

It's a win-win situation. Parents can get rid of the kids for a week or two during the summer by sending them to a place that might turn them into The Next Bill Gates, while the kids get to spend the time on a college campus messing around with computers.

Computer Adventures, a new Los Gatos-based company, starts a unique brand of computer camps for kids this summer at five West Coast universities.

Alexa Ingram-Cauchi, 27, and Pete Findley, 24, are recent graduates of the University of Washington in Seattle who were first bitten by the entrepreneurial bug in January 1997. They did market research, conducted surveys, held focus groups and wrote a business plan, and by summer their pilot program was up and running at the UW.

Ingram-Cauchi, who grew up in Los Gatos, and Findley, a Seattle native, participated in the school's entrepreneurship program, in which they worked closely with faculty members to develop their program.

The program, for kids ages 8 to 16, offers varying levels of instruction on different software packages, and kids can sign up for one or more weeks of camp without repeating the same lessons. Kids can choose to stay overnight or participate in the day program, held from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This summer, camps will be held June 29-Aug. 21 at UC-Santa Cruz, Santa Clara University, theUniversity of San Francisco, the University of Puget Sound and again at the UW. Ingram-Cauchi and Findley are in the process of hiring up to 80 employees who will staff the camps this summer.

The company is looking for highly recommended technology teachers to work as instructors, who will teach groups of up to six kids. Each camper will have a computer.

Thanks to the help of volunteers and generous donations from high-tech companies, the entrepreneurs were able to get the company off the ground with a minimum of startup capital.

The camp's curriculum introduces kids to robotics, multimedia, animation, virtual reality, technical support, Web authoring and programming in Logo, C++ and Java.

But the camps will also have analog activities, such as team-building sessions, sports and games. According to Ingram-Cauchi, it's essential that the kids gain people skills as well as technical abilities.

"Kids can get so engrossed with the computer that they block out everything around them," she says. "But if they want to get into the technology industry, they have to learn to work with people. They can't go out into the workforce without being balanced."

At last summer's camp, four 10-year-olds in the program--who had no previous training before attending the camp--were found poking around inside the UW computer networks, and they had learned enough about the Unix system to bring the whole thing down.

"Kids are so smart at that age; a lot of people don't think they can grasp the technology, but these kids were completely self-taught," Ingram-Cauchi says.

To get them away from hacking, she introduced them to a more benign pursuit--3-D animation. It's an example, she says, of why it's important to keep the kids focused on constructive goals.

The camp isn't just for young hackers. Each area of instruction is divided into different ability levels, so beginners will be as comfortable as the experts.

Ingram-Cauchi says Computer Adventures will be expanding next year, with three new camps on the West Coast. The company operates year-round, Findley says, because it takes nine months of planning to pull off the three-month summer program.

Computer Adventures also runs a computer-training program for retirees and seniors in the Seattle area, which may be expanded later.

For more information on the camps, call 888/904-CAMP, or on the Web, point browsers to www.computeradventures.com.

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