Monthly Update - January 2025

Whew! The first month of 2025 really seemed to fly by! We have a very special edition of our monthly blog to share today, and some important updates, so let's jump right into it!

In January we distributed 629 devices, surpassing not just our monthly distribution goal, but achieving our annual distribution goal two months ahead of schedule! Thank you to our amazing clients for continuing to support our work and your communities, and of course, a massive thank you to our rockstar interns.

We welcomed new interns Nilofar, Ryan and Vincent to the team and look forward to working with them over the next few months. They’ve been a great asset working to prepare laptops for the Surrey Fire Fighters Charitable Society who have received over 400 devices in the last few months for redistribution to Surrey School’s Welcome Centre and to other low income youth.

A call to action for municipal governments to donate their retired computer technology has been issued. The City of Vancouver, City of Burnaby and Metro Vancouver are valued donors to BC Tech. All three have won awards at our annual Donor Recognition Event for their dedication to giving back to British Columbians through retired tech. We urge other cities and regional districts to join them, because municipalities are where people live.

You can read our letter here and share it on LinkedIn.

As always, a huge thank you to our donors for your support in January, including City of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Airport Authority, Douglas College, NTT DATA, Tritek Business Solutions, SYNAPSIS Technical Services, and many federal government departments.

Coming up with BC Tech for Learning

Share the Love, our big fundraising event is coming up in just over a week! Do you have your tickets yet? Non-profits across Canada are struggling with an affordability crisis. Fundraisers like Share the Love help us cover our operations costs so that we can continue to do what we do best - refurbishing and redistributing technology to British Columbians in need. 

Get your tickets and join us Wednesday, February 12 at 6PM!

Now, onto a special segment of our monthly blog! We received the opportunity to chat with now retired Maple Ridge school teacher, Dave Squires, who received the first computer lab in Canada. Mr. Squires was the teacher in charge of that lab, and he shared how the lab came to be, the challenges they faced, and how the lab continued to grow and evolve until his retirement in 2004. It’s a great story of technological innovation!

Spearheading educational innovation: The story of the first school computer lab in Canada.

Computers are everywhere today: In education, in our government services, in how we communicate with friends and family. So many tasks in 2025 would be harder, if not outright impossible to do without one of these electric brains.

In our school systems, teachers use Microsoft 365 for assignments. Online classes require a computer in the home to attend classes and complete assignments.

Today, children as young as 8 years old come to class having already been exposed to computers or some sort of electronic device. Technology has evolved over the years, as has the usage of technology in schools. The learning curve isn’t quite so steep anymore.

Well, we had to start somewhere.

One of the first school computer labs in Canada was built in Maple Ridge’s Westview Secondary (then Westview Junior Secondary), and still stands today. This computer lab was the result of a grant from Apple in 1985.

Dave Squires came to Westview Junior Secondary in 1980. Squires, a science teacher by trade, taught many subjects through his years, including science, consumer education, math, and eventually, typing.

In 1980, Squires’ principal told him he was in charge of looking after Westview’s first-ever computer. The problem? Squires had no computer experience? at that point! Nonetheless, by September he knew how to boot it up, and was considered the school’s “expert” in charge of the computer club.

In September of 1982, Squires started his Masters of Computer Education at Simon Fraser University, then took a year off work in 1984 to work at SFU’s computer lab. When he returned, he was more than prepared to work with the school on their Apple grant.

“Our proposal was to use the lab with AppleWorks, then a new application. We proposed AppleWorks word processing for English composition where spelling and grammar could be corrected and the teacher could easily read what the student wrote,” Squires says.

The school received 17 networked Apple II computers, with 100 megabyte hard drives that Squires recalls were a foot wide, a foot high, and two feet long, with cables that were as thick as your thumb. It would be many years before the NVME drive would be developed to fit in the palm of your hand!

Squires was excited about the educational benefits of having this new technology available to teachers, especially for English classes, but as one of the first schools in Canada to have a computer lab, teachers were learning these devices in real time with their students.

“After Christmas, I started talking to staff about using the computers and what kinds of projects they might do.”

In the early years of the lab, weak typing skills meant work was slow to get done, and the lab did not take off at the start. After an hour in the lab, not much work had been done.

“There were 5 periods during the day, and I don’t think I had more than 3 classes come in during those 5 periods, because the teachers didn’t know what to do with them and didn’t have any technical skills themselves,” Squires says.

The project was innovative at the time, allowing staff and students to experiment with the computers, learn how they worked, and see how they could be used. Students could take typing as a subject to learn more about the device.

At first, computers were used for English classes, where students would be assigned a paragraph to write. The documents could be printed out so that teachers could mark them, and over time larger projects would be assigned, leading to assignments that were anywhere from one paragraph to a full page.

It took a bit longer for the computers to be used for other subjects, but Squires remembers adoption by social studies and science classrooms as well.

Was it smooth sailing for Squires and Westview Junior Secondary when the computers were first implemented? Of course not! Much like modern computers, there was troubleshooting to be done.

In the early days of the lab, data on the computers was overwritten whenever someone new hit “save”. The hard drives were not properly partitioned, and when one computer had multiple users, documents would disappear.

A problem was first discovered when staff came in on an October Professional Development day to learn how to use the computers and save their work. After the morning coffee break, the teachers came back in to retrieve their work, but it was a ”mess”, with the file they had saved also containing parts of other teachers' files that had been saved over top of their work. They recognized they had a larger problem on their hands. The data on the hard drive was overwritten with the last files saved. The hard drive was not properly set up, and when one networked computer had multiple users, documents would disappear.

Between the school staff, their advisor from UBC, and Apple themselves, Squires recalls that no one could figure out how to fix the problem. Eventually, Apple technicians from Toronto flew out and reformatted the large drive to have 16 partitions that were 5 megabytes each. By today’s standards, 5 megabytes will hold either 5 photos, 12 seconds of video, or one song on your smartphone.

The next summer, the computers were upgraded to newer versions with internal hard drives. When Squires retired in 2004, there were 4 fully functional computer labs at the school.

Early adoption of computer labs in schools in Canada led to the innovation of technology in our education system, showing successful usage of devices for learning. By the time the Computers for Schools program was announced in 1993 just 8 years later, we had discovered how important it is to have devices for education and realized that there was a need to make these devices available to schools across Canada. At the time, the internet was coming into the mainstream and computers were thousands of dollars each.

Schools like Westview Junior Secondary pioneered innovation that inspired programs like Computers for Schools Plus to work towards fair access to educational technology for all. Without these programs that propel students into the future, Canadian students risk being left behind in an ever-increasing technological “workplace”.

Our classrooms are only as strong as the teachers who take advantage of grants, funding, and programs that drive innovation in our classrooms. Thank you to Mr. Squires for starting us out by propelling Canadian public education forward through technology.

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