We are proud to announce that the president of Designing Digitally, Inc., Andrew Hughes, will be facilitating a summer technology camp in Putnam County (where he is originally from) this summer. Andrew goes back each year to help kids in rural areas learn open source software so that students can discover what options are out there to develop and create without spending any money. Each year the students are provided with jump drives (U3 drives) that have open source software such as Gimpshop, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org, and even the Hippo Client installed. This ensures that there are no issues with software being installed on the childrens/parents home computers.From there the students are shown how to use Second Life for educational purposes (OpenSim is actually installed on a local machine for security reasons and they connect to that during the camp and learn to build, interact, etc.). The kids also get to make t-shirts, magnets, and videos which are put on YouTube (with permission from their parents).When Andrew was a student at Columbus Grove he was fortune enough to be a participant of this camp. After leaving Putnam County for college he was informed the camp was no longer being held. He approached the PCESC and asked if he could facilitate this camp to help continue this technology tradition.Without the knowledge that Andrew gained from attending the camp, he truly believes that it is unlikely he would have attended school for Digital Design or started Designing Digitally, Inc.According to Andrew, “Kids do not know what they have never been subjected to. Hopefully planting the seed of interest in the students will spark them to integrate technology into their lives.” Assistants this year include Andrew’s younger brother, Alex Hughes (who is currently attending Bowling Green State University for Visual Communication Technology) and Shawn Fairborn from the PCESC. Designing Digitally, Inc.’s technology camp has been such as a success that we have extended the camp from one week to two weeks which will be held this year from June 15th – June 19th and June 22nd – June 26th. We are excited to help out the rural middle schools kids by showing them what’s out there in the technology realm. There might be a Bill Gates (sorry anti-windows people) or Steve Wozniak (sorry anti-apple people) living in these rural areas but might never be given a seed to start growing their technology interest without this camp. To learn more:http://putnam.noacsc.org/Last years blog posts from the kids (had to blog each day): Week 1 camp:http://pcesc.wordpress.com/ Week 2 camp:http://pcesc2.wordpress.com/ This years blog is: http://pcescsummertechcamp2009.wordpress.com/