After working with floppy disks for nearly two decades, the computer science classes will begin using modern flash drives this school year.
Computer science classes work on learning and creating computer programs. A storage device is needed for saving the programs and storing the progress at school.
Ms. Lynda Roszko, the Leesville computer science teacher, feels grateful for the upgrade. “We need them to store all our work on. They’re faster than floppies. I started teaching in 1999, and for five years, we had a spot on the server, which was really nice. And then we went backwards. We used floppy disks since 2004.”
Besides allowing for much faster loading, the flash drives will let students have easier accessibility to the programs outside of school. Michael Goff, a junior, says the flash drives will make his life more convenient. “They’re a lot faster than the floppy disks. It’s a lot easier to carry a flash drive. I had to copy it over to a different medium to work on it at home.”
Historically, computer science classes have never received much funding from Wake County. Cory Scheviak, a senior, has been taking computer science all throughout his high school career and has felt the effects of using antiquated devices. “Wake County was too cheap to buy flash drives. Even when they told us we would get new computers, they just hand us down all the CTE [Career and Technical Education] computers, which half of them didn’t work. We finally got new computers, and they didn’t have floppy drives, so they [Wake County] were kind of forced to give us flash drives.”
Like Goff, Scheviak believes the new flash drives will greatly increase his capacity for learning. “In the past, it took forever to save and run them [programs] because of the floppy disks. Now we have finally caught up to the rest of the 20th century.”
I think math competitions are amazing.