[Symbiote]

My friends and I were accused of interfering with the school computers on a few occasions. I think we were just bored -- we lacked direction and inspiration.

The computers had Visual Basic installed, and my uncle had given me a "Teach yourself VB in 24 hours" book. I followed all the exercises, but I didn't know what to do next. The book was obviously intended for business programming, so it didn't have any interesting suggestions. I wanted to make a game, or animations, but didn't know where to start.

I did implement a card game, but couldn't get any animations to work smoothly, and eventually gave up. The teachers knew nothing about programming, so they couldn't help, and couldn't even recommend other books or a web site. I think they regarded whatever I made with suspicion.

Competant teachers should have been able to provide programming exercises (or a larger project) that I was capable of implementing, but challenged me to learn something new with each task.

Instead, we made bar charts in Excel, and had about as much respect for IT as a subject as we did for gym class.