IT staff from Best Buy gathered at St. Francis International School Sept. 19 and 20 and led students through interactive workshops in computer programming, video production, and the use of computers to generate music and art.

The event, held at the school's Silver Spring campus, was Geek Squad Summer Academy, an annual technology-education program that the Geek Squad hosts, with assistance from the youth nonprofit Camp Fire USA, in communities around the country.

“We at Geek Squad have an hour-to-hour interface with technology,” said Dan Dolar, one of the Geek Squad “field lieutenants” who were overseeing the two-day program.

“As fast as it goes, we ride that wave. We know what is up and coming—and we are in a unique position to give back that knowledge.”

In classrooms throughout the school, pupils gathered in groups of 25 to 30 for classes taught by Geek Squad “field agents.” In one class, pupils—called “junior agents” throughout the two days—learned to shoot and edit video, while in another, they computer-generated their own music.

In a third class, the junior agents were split up into several groups. Each group got one computer and a field agent who would show the group how to take the computer apart, put it back together and to troubleshoot it.

Following each day’s lunch break, junior agents got a short period of video game playtime. They could play games on any of four Xbox systems and four Wii systems, all courtesy of Best Buy.

“It’s like their recess,” Dolar said of the video game playtime. “We let that in so they can blow off steam.”

The classes were themselves were also game-like.  

Nikki Marche, another field lieutenant, said that field agents running the computer disassembly-and-reassembly class followed their presentations with trivia sessions for junior agents to compete on showing how many parts’ names and functions they had learned.

Marche also saw some healthy competition in the music-making class. Junior agents excitedly played their newly made tunes to each other and to the grownups.

“They were always inviting us over, saying, ‘Come listen to what we made.’ They were very proud of their music,” said Marche.

St. Francis is the only Maryland school that the Geek Squad Summer Academy visited this year. After Sept. 20, the crew shipped out to California to host a Summer Academy for children whose parents are serving in the U.S. military.

Tobias Harkleroad, St. Francis principal, praised the Geek Squad Summer Academy for giving its student body lessons in technology that St. Francis itself could not have given them. He said that the two-day program inspired both the pupils and their teachers.

“What Geek Squad was able to bring in with the technology and talent was far beyond anything we could teach our kids by ourselves,” he said. “It’s going to be sad for our kids later this week when they have to come back to our small computer lab but they still have all these big ideas.”