Bandys’s first round of playoffs against Ashe County was a success in many ways. Apart from the Trojans defeating the Huskies 40 to 14, viewing friday night football forever changed at Bandys High. Last Friday, the first game in Bandys history was streamed live on the internet.
The driving force behind this momentous event was to help one of our own. Bandys’s fullback, Jackson G., was involved in a severe car accident that left him in critical condition. This terrible event struck the lives of every person on the team, in the school, and in the community. To make Jackson’s road to recovery a little bit easier, Principal, Todd Black, wanted to find a way to let Jackson watch the game because he was not cleared by the doctors yet to be at the game in person. With this idea, Principal Black sought out the Bandys CTE department to see if this proposal was even possible.
First, Principal Black contacted the North Carolina High School Athletic Association and explained our situation with Jackson. With their permission, the project was a go. Our Networking Class quickly went to work coming up with a solution. Our football stadium has no networking capability or Internet access. Our CTE computer classroom is actually one of the closest points in our building to our football stadium. We decided that our best option was to figure out how to get a network drop from our classroom to a point in the stadium where we could film.
We just finished our study of networking media and we learned about the limitations of certain cable types. Our county IT staff donated a reel of Category 5 UTP cable for us to use for the project. We know from our studies that the maximum length we can go with this type of cable is around 100 meters. Our class terminated the cable and pushed the length to the max. We plugged one end into our school network and went out the window and all the way to the football stadium. Our preliminary tests seemed to confirm that our cable would work.
At this point our Video Editing Class took over. We learned that the Ustream website would let us deliver a live broadcast if our bandwidth was good enough. The direct cable created by our networking class provided just that. We setup a school laptop and a Sony Handycam for the project. We created a channel on Ustream and setup on top of our souvenir storage building. We connected to our network connection and everything worked perfectly. Throughout the game we adjusted the video and audio quality and experimented with what combination worked best. Our teacher was on the phone with Jackson's dad confirming how our adjustments affected the broadcast. By halftime we had eliminated all video lag and pixelation.
Jackson's dad said our project was a great success. He seemed to deeply appreciate our efforts. As a student I think it is really cool to learn something in class and actually apply it to a real-world situation. I will take this occurrence and what I learned from this project and use it in the future. I loved the fact that I could take something I have been learning about and use it to help others. I believe there should be more classes like these that apply to everyday life and help students be successful in their future.