I Am Trying To Set Up For A Visit By FunTech In The Summer Holiday...

[6Foot2]

Has anyone heard of FunTech? They want me to allow users access to C:\, and Appdata, something we just don't allow for our normal student users. To make this work I will have to create a local (Admin?) user at each station and install the software they require for their course at each station manually.

 

Some of the software they require:

 

Paint.net 4.51, and Visual Studio Code 1.30.2, yEd Graph Editor 3.18.2, Minecraft With MODS, Minecraft Redstone, LEGO Robotics, Scratch, Java Coder, App Design, 3D Game Design, Drone Coder, 3D Modelling And Printing.

 

They have also given me a long list of IPs and websites that needs to be accessible for their course to be successful.

 

In summary then: Anyone had FunTech visit? How did it go?

 

Thanks.

[sidewinder]

Yes, we have had them at our school for a number of years. In terms of the operation of the camps, they are usually fine. And once the installations have been done we don't have a lot to do with them. The issue is the huge amount of time it takes to install all their software, then image PCs back for school use at the end of the holiday. PM me if you want to chat in detail about them.

[HarryMonkey]

Our site manager asked us about them after an enquiry from them for the summer. This was our response ...

 

 

I don’t feel that we are in a position to agree to this booking.

 

1. It would be a bad idea to agree to the use of computers over the summer when this is the time of year when IT Support would be planning to complete system upgrades and general maintenance that usually affect all workstations in the school. Often we struggle to find suitable periods when the network can be shutdown because of results days etc.

 

2. FunTech have not provided enough information on what type of software they are expecting to run on our workstations. It is very likely that they would encounter problems with the standard user restrictions imposed by our network. It would put is in a difficult position if the school agreed only to find that FunTech could not run their proposed programme.

 

3. Creating user accounts and possibly installing additional software would add substantially to the workload of the IT Support team in a period of time where we have often found that there is barely enough time to prepare for September.

 

Also IT Support is about to encounter major staffing problems this year which will make it difficult to maintain a reasonable support service and I would suggest that agreeing to this booking would be very unwise.

[FishCustard]

VMs might get around the software/permissions issues, but this seems a very heavy workload for a booking. They should bring their own PCs if they want them so customised!