Challenging high-tech courses give students leg up in high-demand fields

Technology’s whiz-bang, Wow! possibilities and job prospects draw career-focused teens. The crest of the tech wave holds commercial promise as well as creative license for kids willing to do the work.

At El Capitan High School in Merced, every student has a laptop, but it is teens in the information technology program who learn how to network and repair them.

Students form the backbone of the campus tech team, said Principal Anthony Johnson. Teen crews keep El Capitan equipment humming while gaining experience and skills highly prized and highly paid in the private sector.

The school also teaches digital media, where video game creators, visual artists and moviemakers get their start. A biotechnology pathway opens doors to budding sciences where nanoparticles work toward curing disease, artificial organs get a virtual trial run and biohackers hold hope to fix genetic abnormalities.

El Capitan’s pioneering programs are noteworthy, but they are not alone on the cutting educational edge.

Teen-run broadcasts give morning announcements at many schools. At Gregori High in north Modesto, Jag News Net provides feature broadcasts and an ongoing people in sports segment.

At Johansen High in east Modesto, senior Haley Pierce is the organizing force behind Viking TV, the school’s news broadcast. “I’ve got to be the adult in the room,” she said with a grin. Broadcasting is one fork of the Digital Arts and Technology Advancement Pathway led by teacher Brad Cornwell.

Her attention to detail means spending time before, during and after school at the campus studio, a small cluster of rooms filled with cameras and computers. “I basically live here,” Pierce added, chuckling.

Her mom pitches in, buying dollar store holiday decorations for the set. “I want her to do her dream. She loves it. She takes our camera and does amazing things with it,” said Christina Pierce.

“Education technology really does enable us to have a dream,” Haley Pierce said.

“Kids in sports – they can see football, kick a ball from the start, from when they’re little. For technology, it’s a little harder for us,” she said. But the link to teamwork that inspires and teachers who care is the same, Pierce said. “We come to school every day to come to our tech classes.”

Her dream is to create digital films, which she sees as compelling, modern-day storytelling. As films become more digitally manipulated for special effects, and video games get more refined and lifelike, she sees a day when films and games will fuse, becoming a new genre of entertainment.

After college, she just might be in the thick of that film-next moment.

For digital media student Gage Graves, the programming behind the video game scenes is more interesting. He and 11 other Johansen seniors are creating what they hope will be a commercially viable game using complex coding platforms.

“Gaming has become a major driver,” Graves said, pushing technological advances in software and hardware. He wants to be a part of that advancing wave.

It is a wave that 2015 pathway graduate Ignacio Malfabon is riding now as he works on his budding film career. He said he took his first high-tech class because he liked to play video games, but stayed on to work behind the camera.

“Since I was a little kid, I’ve liked videos and stories. As a kid, you visualized yourself in those stories. I see this as being able to share my stories with the world,” Malfabon said.

Since exiting the encouraging world of high school high tech, he has found that this cutting-edge world takes discipline and dedication.

“You have to work hard, if this is something you really want. This is a very competitive thing and you get out of it what you put into it,” Malfabon said. “Tech is moving forward and you have to be able to make the most out of it.”

Graves agreed, “You have to put in a lot of work to get a better edge.”

Part of that work is the programming codes and the laborious building of game platforms and three-dimensional sets. But part of it is the background knowledge he needs to make his video game look and sound more realistic, noted teacher Cornwell.

“It’s math. It’s science. It’s physics. It’s students focusing on projects and you adjust the projects to the students,” Cornwell said. He loses about five students each year who find the challenge too daunting. “They don’t realize how challenging it is. This is very, very technical,” he said.

Cornwell left a high-tech job for teaching, seeing a need to help kids connect to their futures. He brings that industry know-how and entrepreneurial drive to the classroom, encouraging his students to put their skills to work in the real world – for the experience as much as the money.

He has campaigned to put higher-capacity computers in student hands, using school funding and industry donations. Johansen has one of the oldest and slowest broadband connections, however, limiting what kids can accomplish in a class period.

But learning on older, slower machines is training grad Malfabon said he appreciates now that he has to fund his own technology. “We focus too much on what’s coming up tomorrow and don’t work with what we have,” he said. “I want to do something great with what I have.”

This story was originally published September 19, 2015 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Challenging high-tech courses give students leg up in high-demand fields."