The last 6 weeks have been very full for Hope IT. This newsletter covers the following, and has lots of pictures (with consent of the parents):
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- Our very first Hope IT field trip to SCaLE 2026
- 2 courses
- Stories with Data
- WordPress with Stars
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You will understand that we are excited, and a bit stretched with all the activity. The students seemed to take this all in just fine.
Thank you for your prayers and encouragement. Do continue to pray for our students as they finish off the school year.
Peace,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead
Field trip to SCaLE 2026
SCaLE is the Southern California Linux Expo, which is usually right here at the Pasadena Convention Center.
Hope IT took 3 students from the Door of Hope, see the picture above and on the right and below. There were just a large range of topics, presentations, and tech to explore. By design, it is meant to provide many angles to the numerous interests.
We took the students on Saturday, from morning to late afternoon. We had lunch in the middle at Old Town’s Dog Haus. We listened to the keynote speaker, attended 2 smaller presentations, and visited both the youth “Next Gen” room of tech demonstration, as well as the large Exhibit Hall, full of booths hosted by companies, clubs, and volunteer groups.
Not surprisingly, the students liked different parts of our day, that connected with their own interests. This was a fun way to explore and learn what is going on with tech…right now…with a bit of explanation from the Hope IT team, and many of it…you just had to see it yourself.
Note: We normally blur out our students faces. We got parental consent to show the full pictures of the field trip for this newsletter.
Stories with Data Course:
Increasingly, having skills to work with data is so important. For students to show others what the data means — tell the story — can set them apart in school and professionally. It is remarkable that students met with us on 4 Saturdays mornings to work with data. Below is a quick review of our course:
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- This on-line course using Google’s free Looker Studio.
- We had a junior and a senior in high schooler, and sibling that graduated from high school. All are from the Door of Hope network.
- We worked with 2 main datasets
- Billboards Top 100 songs since 2000
- COVID cases back from 2020 to 2023
- We focused on key statistical functions like minimums and maximums, total counts, and averages.
- We created grid charts, bar charts, line charts, and a geo-chart of the US.
- Below is one of the students dashboard/report.
WordPress with Stars:
Hope IT gratefully joined the Stars’ After-school high school group in February, offering them our WordPress course to create websites.
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- We meet on 4 Tuesday nights in Pasadena.
- 2 high school seniors joined in.
- We learned how to do some basic items like adding text, photos and videos to web pages.
- We also explored non-visual topics like:
- tracking visitors to your website
- optimizing your pages and posts for search engines to point people to your website
- and backing up and restoring your website, and even migrating your website to a new domain.
- This allows them to gain confidence in going even further on WordPress, and/or to learn a new topic.
- See the pictures below
- Notice our comfy learning space.
- Get a glimpse of the websites the students created below.
