Who We Are

We are Casas Adobes Baptist Church, a large community church located on 85 acres in the middle of a high growth area on the northwest side of Tucson, Arizona. We have a membership of over 6,000. We also have an early childhood development center and a K-8 school with an enrollment of 365. Therefore, sharing our rooms with the school makes for a unique set of challenges in the operation of our Sunday programs. Our rotation workshop program is called Kids’ Central with the computer workshop called The Masters Megabytes. We offer Kids’ Central at two different times on Sunday mornings with a total average attendance of 440 children.

The Master’s Megabytes

The Master’s Megabytes (computer workshop) has twenty-seven computers. It is also used by the school during the week. All of the computers are Pentium 200+ multimedia. The goal is to have all of them networked (to share printers and operating system maintenance, NOT to illegally network software). Another goal that is close to completion is to have all the internal hardware identical so that every program will work on every computer the same way. (This minimizes potential installation trouble which could be a real hassle with 27 different computers).

How Did Our Lab Become So Large?

Our lab has become large because of four factors:

The first one is that it is used by the school during the weekdays and has been funded by the school. However, even the school could not support the expense of providing twenty-seven computers with a high quality printer for every four computers.

The second factor is that our children’s ministry has been able to contribute money for several of the printers and also for some of the hardware.

The third factor is a large defense contractor donated some hardware when one of their contracts came to an end. (I haven't asked Lee how they would have done a lab had they NOT received the donation. But as many of you know, getting computers is often easy. They probably would have had to divide some classes.)

The fourth factor is the teacher who teaches the computer classes for the school is very good at saving many dollars by buying the hardware components (hard drives, memory, etc.) and then building many of the computers.

How Do We Use Our Lab?

Kids’ Central (first thru fifth grade) uses the lab every Sunday morning. The Master’s Megabytes is one our core workshops used in every rotation. Usually, we have about forty to forty-five children each computer session. This means that there are two children to a computer with each computer having two sets of headphones. Therefore, the children work in pairs as they share the same audio and screen information. (Headphones? Ok Lee...with 27 computers I think we all know why you had to go to headphones! Notice what he's about to say, however, about the great teacher-student ratio they have....)

We have one person who is the coordinator for the computers. This person’s responsibility is to recruit and train the teachers. Usually there are three teachers for each session along with four or five shepherds. The shepherds escort the children to the computer room and then interact with them during the teaching time. This means that there are eight adults in the lab with the children. The ratio works out to about one adult for every six children.

The lead teacher uses the first five minutes to introduce the lesson and explain the objective(s) of the computer program that the children will be using. This leaves about thirty minutes for the children to use the computers. Our objectives are two-fold. The first objective is to reinforce the overall theme of the five-week rotation along with providing the children with more in-depth information. The second objective is to promote the children’s individual creativity. Writing and drawing programs help accomplish this objective.

Sometimes we have half of the children using a writing/drawing program and the other half using an informational program such as The Life of Christ. After approximately fifteen minutes, we have the children switch computers. Other times, all twenty-seven computers will have the same program running at the same time. This means that we need to have twenty-seven copies of the programs that are CD-ROM interactive. The configuration of the computer set-up depends on the objectives for the rotation. (In effect, it's like having two classes in one lab. Do-able because of the high teacher-student ratio. Necessary too, otherwise their 27 computers would require 27 copies of each program they wanted to use. The larger your lab, the more careful you have to be.)

Positives And Negatives

The positives of the lab experience for our children have been many. First, our children have indicated that this workshop is their favorite with our restaurant workshop being their second. (You may be wondering "Restaurant workshop?" This is a Rotation Model's creative name for 'learning the Bible story through cooking').

Second, our children have been challenged to learn new things as well as “create” or put thoughts into action in the form of articles or pictures. Third, we have enjoyed a great deal of success in sharing the computers with the school because our Kids’ Central computer coordinator and the schoolteacher know each other very well. The trust between the two has resulted in a minimum of problems. (I've underlined what Lee just wrote. It all comes down to the people, doesn't it!)

Fourth, we have had very few problems with the children mistreating the equipment because they are actively engaged in the lesson for the full thirty minutes. There are not very many “Sunday School” classes where you have children anxiously waiting to learn something new. This positive is sometimes a negative because the children don’t always listen as attentively as they should for the first five minutes of introduction and directions because they want to “get on” the computers. But, we will take that “problem” any day. There really aren’t any other negatives that are associated with this workshop aside from the fact that there is a large expense associated with purchasing multiple copies of software.

Individual Workshops Are Called Breakouts

We call our individual workshops “breakouts” because we first assemble in a large group (220-250 children at a time) in what we call Gospel Spotlight for twenty minutes. During this time, we have praise, worship, offering and our story telling time. It is almost like a mini-church service only geared to children. Often times we use skits or other dramatic ways to tell the story. Then, we “breakout” to our various workshops for the last forty-five minutes.

The last ten to fifteen minutes of each breakout is used by the shepherds in helping the children process what they learned followed with sharing of concerns and prayer time.

Keys For Success

We believe the key things to keep in mind for planning and implementing a large lab is that the person in charge (coordinator in our case) should be a “computer” person who understands children and the rotation workshop model. Also, the teacher and coordinator must get to know and trust each other if the lab is shared with the school. We think that this is critical because there can be a real possibility of friction.

Extra Neil Notes:

Large donations of hardware don't often come with large donations for software. Thus, large labs often have to settle for less variety in their software because they require large numbers of the same program. Lee's computer lab would be absolute chaos and very difficult to plan and run if they only had a few copies of many different program.

Creative writing and drawing programs, such as Writing Blaster are extremely versatile. Because they cover large numbers of Bible stories, programs such as Life of Christ, Bibleland.com and Play and Learn are also good purchases for large labs on a limited budget.

If you'd like to talk with Lee, email him at LeeE@casaschurch.org