By Yuka Noda
Calendar Editor
From avid video gamers to aspiring coders, many Costa students are embracing the oppurtunity to start their own technological clubs on campus with the support of Advanced Placement Java Computer Science teacher Aaron Braskin.
Braskin is the advisor of three new clubs: the Super Smash Bros. Brawl Club, Artemis Club and the Girls Coding Club. Although they vary in club activities, these new clubs all emphasize technology.
“The clubs are mainly student driven, and since my room has two screen projectors, it is the perfect place to hold meetings,” Braskin said.
Senior Nate Schickler founded the Super Smash Bros. Brawl Club to improve his skills when he first heard about the Southern California Brawl Tournament. In this tournament, professional gamers compete while role-playing as characters from many different Nintendo games such as Link from the “Legends of Zelda” or Pikachu from “Pokémon.”
“I created this group to hone my skills among players of a high skill level as well as to interest other people in the game,” Schickler said. “We wanted to play against the other professional players in the Brawl competitive community.”
To accommodate the club’s rising number of members, participants play short-rounded tournaments. During the tournaments, other members bring in Nintendo DS consoles and play “Super Smash 4” against each other.
“We mostly play the fan-created Project M, a version of Brawl used in competitive play based on the style of Melee, or hand-to-hand combat,” Schickler said. “We use official tournament rules.”
Artemis Club, comprised of approximately 20 members, meets Fridays at lunch in room 116. Members use a spaceship bridge simulator to defend their spaceships and attack enemies.
“We have to cooperate with our teams to defend our own spaceships,” junior co-president John Plaster said. “The opportunities are endless when playing.”
The Girls Coding Club, created by junior Olivia Orrell-Jones, is dedicated to teaching female Costa students to code in HTML, a hypertext markup language, as well as in JavaScript.
“I started taking coding class during the summer before ninth grade, and I noticed I was often surrounded by young boys,” Orrell-Jones said. “Girls are rarely encouraged to learn how to code, and I wanted to help girls recognize the opportunities that come with knowing how to code.”
According to Braskin, there is still a lack of women in the computer science field. Although Costa’s AP Java course has 20% female students, which is well above the national average, Braskin believes the number of women in the field should be higher because of the oppurtunities that are available to coders.
“Technology can play a role in any club, but the students just have to have the desire to make it happen,” Braskin said.
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