CIRCUITS

Not Just Closing a Divide, but Leaping It

By MICHEL MARRIOTT (NYT) 1542 words

For five weeks, he had toiled over a game of his own, Buzz, pitting a wasp against swarms of increasingly troublesome foes. The development laboratory was not a company cubicle or a computer geek's bedroom. For Dennis, 16, it was a clubhouse in Albuquerque created to help young people in low-income areas apply digital skills to creative use.

With suggestions from the clubhouse coordinator and its collection of expensive software, Dennis had decided to do more than just make a game. He wrote, illustrated and printed an instruction booklet, designed packaging and produced an animated commercial for it, including an electronically produced soundtrack. Now he put his creation to a professional test.

''That's cool,'' declared John Beauchemin, an animator for Helixe, a game development studio in Lexington, Mass., paying the game world's ultimate compliment.

Dennis was among more than 100 young people from the United States and abroad who spent four July days here to share and further their accomplishments in the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, a program designed to foster not only computer skills but collaboration and leadership as well.

The program's goal echoes a rallying cry in the debate over what has come to be known as the digital divide. New studies show that the gap in computer access based on differences in race, income or educational level is narrowing -- although whether that progress justifies curtailing federal efforts to close the gap, as the Bush administration contends, remains in dispute.

In any case, some educators, technology experts and community organizers say the challenge is more complex than providing equipment, Internet connections and basic training. What young people need, they say, is help in developing fluency with advanced computer hardware and software.

''Access is not enough,'' said Mitchel Resnick, associate professor of learning research at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology's Media Laboratory. ''Access is just a starting point.''

In 1993, with money from the Intel Corporation, Professor Resnick helped establish the first site of what is today an international network of 50 Computer Clubhouses, including the New Mexico center that Dennis visits at least three times a week. The clubhouses are places where boys and girls, 8 to 18, can ''really feel in charge of the technology,'' Professor Resnick said.

''It's not about playing games, but about making your own games,'' he said. ''It's not about surfing the Web, but it's about making your own Web pages. It's not just about downloading MP3 music files, but doing your own music composition.''

Roma Arellano, worldwide community education manager for Intel, said the goal was to cultivate technologically confident thinkers, collaborators and problem-solvers, regardless of their economic origins. ''We want to see young people literally taking their own ideas and creating,'' she said.

For Dennis, the issue is not access to a computer: he shares a reasonably powerful, though crash-prone, home PC with his mother and his 14-year-old brother. But at home he does not have the microprocessing power, expensive programs and occasional help required to work on his games and related projects. For that he goes a few blocks from his high school to the Albuquerque clubhouse, which operators say about 25 young people visit on a typical weekday.

''The clubhouse gives you a lot of freedom to see what you really want to do and gives you the tools to create it,'' Dennis said. ''I always wanted to make a video game, but never had the software to make it. I didn't know where to start.''

The clubhouse network, which extends to such countries as Ireland, Israel, India, Germany, the Netherlands and the Philippines, has a $32 million commitment from Intel through 2005, in addition to hardware, software and services donated by technology companies including Adobe Systems, Macromedia, Hewlett-Packard and Autodesk.

Such private-sector efforts may be all the more important if federal initiatives aimed at closing the digital divide are indeed cut back. But even those who agree that a divide exists do not necessarily agree on how to go about eliminating it.

For example, at Playing2Win, a 22-year-old community center in Harlem supported by foundation grants and other contributions, the emphasis is on teaching work and life skills, said the center's director, Ka Ogunka. That can encompass computer repair as a way to teach problem solving, and employment-oriented goals like mastering word processing programs and other basic office software.

''It's hard to keep the interest of our students if we don't show how this can immediately benefit them,'' Ms. Ogunka said. ''We have to show them that the skills we're teaching them are worth learning and that they are applicable in the real world.''

Otherwise, she added, ''they might take a job at Domino's before coming to us.''

At the Computer Clubhouse, in contrast, there are no formal instructors, only mentors, a clubhouse manager and small staff. Learning is gently guided, and areas of interest are usually identified by the young people.

At the flagship clubhouse here in Boston, tucked away in the training wing of the Museum of Science along the Charles River, the most popular activities include creating custom animations, music videos, digital comic books and games, and mechanized robotics, said Marlon Orozco, the center's soft-spoken manager.

One of the biggest draws is the digital studio, a glass-enclosed back room equipped with a synthesizer, microphones and a CD-burning computer loaded with software to create and edit music. During recording sessions, the glass trembles with booming bass notes and synthesized percussion.

At first, anyone could drop in and use the studio, ''but so many people were going back there that it got to the point where we had to put in some limits,'' said Mr. Orozco, 27, who began working with the clubhouse when he was 18. ''Some people were dominating the room.'' Now a sign-up sheet hangs outside the studio's glass door.

Stephen Ruggs, 18, of Boston is a regular. For more than a year he has been working almost five days a week on a collection of rap music he has largely created, recorded and mixed at the clubhouse.

Adept on a computer keyboard, he manipulates software to serve the needs of his hip-hop alter ego, named Square-Route. But he prefers to write and edit his lyrics in longhand because, he explained, he has little access to a computer before he arrives at the clubhouse after school.

Introduced to basic computing in high school, Stephen said he practically taught himself how to use music software at the clubhouse, which has become an informal hangout for him and friends lured there by the cutting-edge technology.

''Everything is generated by computers,'' he said during a break after starting what he hopes will be his demo CD for a lucrative recording contract, titled ''One Route 2 Da Game.'' ''We couldn't do what we do without these computers.''

Most of the youths who regularly flock to the clubhouse are black, like Stephen, or Hispanic, like Dennis Paiz-Ramirez.

From the beginning, Professor Resnick said, the Computer Clubhouse took an approach that differs from those of other technology centers. ''There were other places kids could go and get access to computers, places they could go and play games or take a course and learn some application,'' he said. ''There's nothing wrong with that. But it wasn't satisfying the need that we saw that was out there for kids to express themselves, to create something, to have a sense that they could bring about change with the technology.''

Dennis is convinced that his command of game technology may well change his future. Despite the care he has taken in the presentation of his game, he says he has no intention of selling it. He is rather hoping to use it as a digital portfolio to give prospective employers and college admission officers a glimpse of what he can do with keyboard, mouse, imagination and determination.

''I'm psyched about it,'' he said as the three-member team from the Helixe studio gathered over his game for a second time. ''All of this is so cool.''