Summer Schools on the Amateur Radio Computing Miroslav Skoric University of Novi Sad Faculty of Technical Sciences Novi Sad, Serbia +381 21 6368579 skoric@uns.ns.ac.yu ABSTRACT Summer schools in computer science dedicated for pre-university students and their teachers would increase the number of decisions for studying CS. With adding a variety of computerrelated amateur radio communications, we introduce excitement for learning and having fun in CS profession. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.m [Miscellaneous]: Computer literacy K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Information systems education for participation would be addressed to a broad educational community, including master and doctoral students from Europe or elsewhere (A regional-wide approach would cut traveling and organizational costs.) With careful planning and preparing, such activity could not only accommodate theoretical lectures and practical demonstrations within the school labs, but to include social, cultural and recreational activities for students. Organizing institutions, preferably from the Mediterranean seaside in Europe (or any other destination), could host the sessions in the university ™s premises and provide meals and accommodation within the student dormitories. The prospective candidates should cover their own travel costs to the venue. The main part of that training would be to teach students and scholars to design, construct, program and use the local AMUNET1, a grid of dedicated computers located at university campuses and surrounding schools, interconnected by the amateur radio infrastructure. Participants would learn about the most suitable hardware (computers, modems, radios, antennas, power supply etc) and software (server, client and repeater programs) for implementations at home, school or work. We are going to overview possible implementations of amateur radio in rural regions and developing communities: Students will get basic knowledge about the amateur radio satellites and exchanging emails without Internet connections and telephone lines, but still have optional and operational gateways between the 'ham' (amateur) radio infrastructure and the Internet. In order to motivate programmers to maintain the open source software products for the amateur computer communications and digital relay systems, as well as experimenters to document their own results, we would discuss (with examples) about writing operating manuals and various online documents2. We plan to activate the knowledge and equipment of the local radio amateurs and educational charities like STELAR “ 'Science and Technology through Educational Links with Amateur Radio', http://www.stelar.org.uk, and perform practical demonstrations with the specially equipped vehicle having a mobile radio shack using a special call sign GB4FUN, http://www.gb4fun.org.uk. Eventual co-sponsorships we expect from the scientific societies: IEEE, ACM, WSEAS, EESTEC; EU funds and other sources. General Terms Experimentation, Design. Keywords Amateur radio, Communication, Computer, Education. 1. INTRODUCTION Almost every day we can read statistical reports on decreasing interest for studying computer science and communication technologies in many nations. On the other side, the long-term experience with amateur radio assures us that a significant percentage of pupils “ being involved in that old hobby are highly motivated to continue their education in the areas of computing, mathematics, and related disciplines. A variety of amateur radio enthusiasts, including women and minorities, communicate from all around the world and both their technical equipment and experience are available on behalf local educational systems. In order to widen the participation in higher education for studying technical majors - not only in his country, the author's actions include, but are not limited to: paper presentations, tutorials and seminars on the amateur radio communications in computer science and engineering education. The next step would be to organize: 2. SUMMER SCHOOL AND 'HAM' RADIO A summer (or a winter) school “ discussing on the amateur radio in SC education can take app. 7-10 days and might be run alone or to be included as an added value into an existing event of computer science education. The most proper timing is the summer and/or winter vacation period of the school year. A call Skoric, M., œThe perspectives of the Amateur University Network “ AMUNET , WSEAS Transactions on Communications, Vol 4, (Sep. 2005), 834-845. Skoric, M., œFBB Packet-radio BBS mini-HOWTO , TLDP The Linux Documentation Project, retrieved from http://tldp.org/HOWTO/FBB.html (2000-2006). Copyright is held by the author/owners. ITiCSE ™07, June 23-27, 2007, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom. ACM 978-1-59593-610-3/07/0006.

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