By Adam Serbin

Recently, fellow eighth grader Damien Rouchouze and I built a brand-new computer for the Charlotte Jewish Day School( CJDS) tech lab, and you looking at it may wonder why it was even necessary, given its flashy lights and its three-fan GPU. So, I’ ll tell you the reasoning, the process, and everything you need to know about this brandnew computer.

The middle school at CJDS has a period at the end of the day called advisory, a daily thirty-minute block whose goal is to teach middle school students important life and job skills. Damien and I were assigned to the podcast division, tasked with producing one podcast a week for the foreseeable future. But there was an issue. The podcast setup featured two microphones and a soundboard, which was not the issue, those worked fine, and a small silver laptop. This laptop can be best described as mediocre at best. Its mouse pad was finicky, and it would sometimes shut down without explanation, making the interface with the soundboard for editing tricky and unpredictable at best.

Seeing this, Damien and I decided we’ d apply a two-bird one-stone tactic and get a better computer while completing another steadily looming thing we needed to do for our eighthgrade project. Now for those who don’ t know what the eighthgrade project is, it’ s a program where the graduating students make something to stay in the school when they leave, it can be anything, it just has to leave a mark. So, we decided to build a computer for the school.

The initial process was quite convoluted, with both of us having conflicting versions of the build. Combine this with the growing shortages of technology in RAM and SSDs, and pressure was building quickly.

Eventually though, we came to a final build proposal to give to Quyen Nguyen, the IT manager of the school, for approval. She had a lot to say about the build. She suggested we look at the monitors again considering performance and cost, and questioned many of the parts, but after a bit, we all agreed on the last build draft and time came to order the parts.

After about a month or so the

parts arrived and Damien and I hauled them up to the third-floor tech lab to assemble. Damien was the main guy for that, as he had more experience with building computers given that he had a small business building and selling them. He was also the main photographer, and he made sure to take a lot of photos.

As for me, I was his assistant, working with seventh grader Isaac Duller. Together we were able to build the rig in about three days and get it to start up fully.

This is where we encountered our first two issues, the monitors not turning on and the unfriendly classroom rabbit, Yenta. Yenta is an exceedingly fat white rabbit who serves as class pet with her buddy Winston. In addition to this, she also has a habit of eating cables. Damien and I had experience with this, as she had eaten some of our cables in the podcast room.

Work began right away to fix these two problems. The first one was fixed very suddenly after one monitor just turned on. We didn’ t do anything to fix it, it just turned on by itself, so that worked out. The second problem

was not as quickly solved. At first, only a large piece of plywood covered the cables, but Yenta could still enter from either side and chew away at our hard work. I admittedly did not address this problem, instead Isaac did, stuffing two foam cylinders in on either side to protect the cables. This seemed to do the trick, and the rabbit retreated back from her shenanigans.

The rest of it went decently well. Windows was installed nicely, the double-monitor setup was made to work, and some basic software was installed for podcast, video editing, and 3D printing.

Now, Damien and I face the quickly approaching future of leaving CJDS. I have been here nine years, a solid two thirds of my life or so, and Damien has been here four. It will be an odd experience leaving the place, but in this project our presence at the school will still have some

worth. The computer is made to last for at least a decade if well maintained, and it has all the software needed to serve its functions for the same time frame with proper updates.

At the time of writing, we’ re making a manual to make sure all kids in the future will know how to use the computer, the last thing we’ ll do for the project. After that it’ s smooth sailing to high school.

For more information about CJDS, contact Gale Osborne at Gosborne @ cjdschool. org.