A Liverpool-based study centre has found that investing in Apple technology has delivered new inspiration for its young students.

“What we wanted to do was offer something unique in terms of what the children would experience”, says Abigail Williams, manager at the Extra Time Study Support Centre at Everton Football Club’s Goodison Park Stadium. “By introducing Macs, we’ve been able help them do something they can’t do anywhere else”.

In May 2001, the Extra Time facility was opened under the Department for Education and Skills ‘Playing for Success’ initiative. According to Williams, the intention was to offer IT resources to children aged between 8 and 14, both through lesson-time activities and voluntary after-school sessions. Since its inception, the centre has played host to over 200 schools and more than 8,000 pupils.

The fact that everything links together is fantastic, you can drag your iPhoto pictures into iMovie, use GarageBand to add music or sound effects and save the results with iDVD. The kids enjoy getting stuck in and they always come away with something good.

— Abigail Williams, Manager at the Extra Time Study Support Centre

Until October 2005, Extra Time was an all-PC environment, offering what Williams describes as “limited activities” — word processing, presentation work and so on. “We were able to do some interactive activities such as quizzes”, she says, “but essentially, it was very similar to what the kids could do at school or any other city learning centre”.

Having experienced increasing drop-out rates, principally among secondary school pupils, the centre consulted with teachers, learning mentors and the students themselves. A general consensus emerged that the students would be interested in multimedia activities such as film- and music-making. The centre subsequently enlisted Apple Solution Experts MCC to spec up, configure and install a fleet of Macs, all fully networked and all loaded with a full complement of creative software, including Apple’s award-winning iLife suite.

Today, just over half of the centre’s computers are Macs — including 20 iMacs equipped with iSight cameras, 8 Mac minis and 6 iBooks. With the refurbishment complete, Williams and her team now offer 5- and 10-week courses in digital photography, animation, film production, and music and radio production.

The courses capitalise on the centre’s location. For digital photography, pupils take photos around the football ground with digital cameras and import them onto the Macs using iPhoto. They then have a wide range of options for image manipulation using iPhoto, Photo Booth, the Adobe Creative Suite and a host of other applications.