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Old made new

Lisa Scott
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 11/04) - It's hard to believe that a mess of outdated hard drives and monitors in an old public works building would be of any use to Yellowknife schools, but it's true.



Olivia Hawker, a 21-year-old Aurora College student, hopes her new computer refurbishing skills will help her snag a computer science spot in a southern university this fall. - Lisa Scott/NNSL photo


Since the fall, 20 computers have been refurbished by Aurora College students in the information technology program.

The students are gaining the practical component needed to complete their year-long program through the NWT chapter of Computers for Schools.

Two mornings a week, students toil in a room filled with ancient computers updating them with new parts like extra memory, disc drives and hard drives flown in from the south.

Wayne Hykaway, the project manager for the Computers for Schools, figures it's a win-win situation. Students get the knowledge and schools get the computers.

"If I can enhance their skills and make them more employable, they are more job ready," he said.

Computers for Schools is not new to the North. The program operated in Yellowknife as recently as 1999 before dying off.

Program to expand

With funding from Industry Canada, Hykaway hopes to expand the NWT chapter into Inuvik and Fort Smith later this year.

Leah Broadhead was computer illiterate before starting the Aurora College program. But with practical training, the 31-year-old student has caught up with the times.

"It reinforces the theory that we learned in school," she said.

Another bonus is providing city schools with Pentium 3 computers.

"If we can give these computers to the students and make them more educated, it's a benefit to the program," she said.

Hykaway has more requests for computers than he can handle right now.

The Catholic school board Career and Technical Centre will be the first recipient of 20 rebuilt systems.

The next step will be expanding workshops to teach elementary and high school students, as well as young offenders, how easy it is to tweak an antiquated machine.