When students came to gifted facilitator Carla Johnston last spring, she was ready to help.

The students wanted to start up technology, programming, robotics and an “Anthology Fair” interest groups. Last week, all four were approved by Manhattan High’s student council.

“It was totally student-driven. It was exciting. I was glad that there were students that wanted to go the extra step and get together and do something challenging and exciting outside of school,” Johnston said.

Sophomore Stephanie Fu was one of the students who wanted to bring the Kansas State Technology Leaders club and a programming club to MHS.

“They’re still in their early stages, but I have high hopes for both,” Fu said. “For the Kansas State Technology Leaders club, our focus will be to prepare our presentations — graphic design, website design, videos, etc. — to compete in the KSTL competition early in April. For the Programming club, our goal is just to increase interest for computer science. I would like to have a website where people can talk about, teach and learn computer science from each other … I was really happy that these interest groups had a lot of support, even from people who weren’t really interested in computer science.”

Fu became interested in computer science after she and her friends created a website in sixth grade for a novel study.

“Through a lot of Google searches about HTML, we were able to pull together a simple group of web pages that linked to each other. It was really simple, but I really liked doing it,” Fu said.

sixth grade was also Fu’s first year participating in the KSTL competition,

“I made a presentation about sports and being healthy with lots of animations of stick figures doing various sports. It was also a simple project, but it was so much fun,” Fu said. “Computers were the coolest thing to me. I saw that they could do so much.”

With the kick-off meeting for the programming group Sept. 21, the robotics group Sept. 22 and the anthology and KSTL groups early October, both Johnston and Fu are excited.

“I think it gives them something in addition to what they have in the regular school day. It’s an opportunity for them to meet new students who have similar interests and perform or compete,” Johnston said.

“I just think that computer science is so important right now and anything you can learn in high school will give you an edge in college even if you are not going to pursue a STEM career,” Fu said. “I think the KSTL group will give me more time and more resources to work on presentations and the programming group will give me a chance to both teach what I know and learn from more experienced programmers. I would like to pursue a career in hardware or software engineering. My dream is to someday have my own computer science-related business.”