DoSomething.org and Lenovo are making summer volunteering fun for teens with an 11-day Scavenger Hunt nationwide. Alison Brie and Danny Pudi, stars of the television show “Community” are supporting the project and encouraging teens to get involved in their respective communities.

“The scavenger hunt is really rooted in the idea that in the summer all teens want to do is be with their friends, be outside [and] have fun,” said Melanie Stevenson, Business Development, DoSomething.org.

Beginning July 11 and ending July 22, the hunt will encourage teens to get up and do something about the issues they are passionate about. They are competing to win prizes such as scholarships, Lenovo computers and a grand prize trip to Los Angeles for the Do Something Awards on August 14.

Lenovo is the fourth-largest PC vendor globally and DoSomething.org is one of the largest organizations in America that helps young people get involved in causes they care about. Stevenson described the relationship between the two companies as a “perfect synergy.”

“Both organizations are really all about your passion…and finding ways for you to create impact,” she said. “[Lenovo’s] marketing tagline is “For Those Who Do” and we are all about those who do as well.”

Each day teens are sent challenges that they can complete individually or with a team. Each challenge relates to issues that concern teens such as violence and bullying, education, the environment and animal warfare.

Kathleen Sullivan, Framingham High School student and Scavenger Hunt participant said, “I’m excited about joining the scavenger hunt because [I want] to help out in the community more and with the scavenger hunt I can help the community in a fun way.”

The challenges are chosen according to the most popular issues and project ideas on the DoSomething.org website. They are able to be completed in one day and can be done in teams.

While Sullivan is participating as an individual, teams of 20 are able to sign up and compete in the scavenger hunt. Teens can text HUNT to 30644 to sign up and receive challenges via text message or sign up on the website, DoSomething.org/hunt.

Currently over 10,000 people are signed up via mobile and there are around 19,000 total participants. Such a great response rate is unprecedented for DoSomething.org. Stevenson attributes this success to the prizes, celebrity involvement and the ability of teens to participate solely through text messaging.

“[This is] the first campaign that we are able to actually implement via mobile exclusively; we can do the whole contest just by texting with teens,” she said. “So that added bonus was perfect for summer participation.”

Additionally, Alison Brie and Danny Pudi are tweeting the challenges daily and the campaign has even received additional support from “Community” cast member Ken Jeong, who is also tweeting challenges.

“Teens in particular are always looking for ways to give back that make sense for their lifestyle,” said Stevenson. “They can’t always commit a full year to a project; they can’t always give money to donate to a cause. The value here is their action and their enthusiasm for a variety of causes.”

Sullivan said that she found out about the campaign on DoSomething.org’s Facebook page and although most of her friends are busy with other summer plans, she hopes they also find ways to get involved with their communities.

It is not too late to participate in the scavenger hunt. Teens have until July 25 to submit their results for the challenges; prize winners will be notified on August 1.

“If you hear about the campaign on day three or day 11 you’ll still have access to the previous days’ challenges and you’ll have a few days after the end of the campaign to complete all of the challenges with your team,” said Stevenson.

Because of the great results the hunt received this year Stevenson said they are certainly hoping to do it again next year. “It is the perfect summer program,” she said.

“I believe I would definitely do it again and maybe next year I’ll have more people [to] participate with me,” said Sullivan.

How much does size matter?

One of the best parts about a netbook is also one of its drawbacks.

They’re small.

The keyboards are undersized. The displays are tiny. But the battery life is huge, and that’s why netbooks are the hottest thing going right now.

The Lenovo S12 attempts to bridge the gap by tossing up a 12.1-inch screen and slightly larger keyboard than the usual netbook. But it is still a netbook with out the bells, whistles and optical drives of traditional computers. This model doesn’t yet have the much rumored and hotly anticipated Nvidia Ion chipset, which will let us run 1080p video and modern PC games on a low power netbook. Therefore, we’re still dealing with a regular old netbook that’s a little bigger.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you. The S12 gets more than five hours of battery life during normal use. You can squeeze out more juice if you’re really careful. The glossy screen is surprising light on the eyes. It’s back-lit running at 1280×800, which is much higher than other netbooks we’ve encountered out there.

The S12 has three USB 2.0 ports, an ethernet port, a 4-in-1 card reader, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, an ExpressCard slot and a standard six-cell battery, which is very, very necessary. Some earlier models came with the three-cell battery. Don’t bother.

The interface is comfortable, and the touchpad is smooth and easy to navigate with. The keyboard is really comfortable to type on, but Lenovo switched the FN and CTRL keys on the left side of the keyboard. It’s a huge pain, because when you think you’re hitting CTRL-C, you’re actually hitting FN-C and not copying that text you wanted.

The 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM are both sufficient for the needs of a netbook user. You can even sneak a few video files on there.

The Intel ATOM N270 processor is also sufficient, especially because the S12 runs Windows XP.

Lenovo also throws in a hard drive backup utility that operates independent of the operating system and a facial recognition security utility that uses the on-board webcam.

If you’re looking for a slightly larger than normal netbook that’s comfortable, with decent battery life, look no further. At $449, it’s pricier than what you might find at the store, but the computer is stable, fairly speedy and still cheaper than a “real” laptop.

Despite being in a relatively technologically advanced world, we still have a lot of holdouts that are decidedly old-school. Why washers and dryers have become more efficient, they’re essentially the same machines your grandparents used. Fax machines are still the most common means of sending documents over long distances. Possibly one of the most glaring examples of this though is the keyboard that you use every day. But, the times they are a changin’, and Lenovo has decided to make some small changes to their keyboard layout which are actually making some big waves.

To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to understand where the layout of your keys was born. The layout on most keyboards is called QWERTY. The keys are actually laid out so that on average, you the most time possible between keystrokes, mostly because the layout was developed on typewriters that would jam. The layout stuck through the development of modern computing, and even though it’s clearly inefficient, we still use it. Alternatives exist, like the Dvorak layout, but these remain niche products that appeal mostly to the ubergeeks.

Laptops, and especially netbooks, pose their own set of challenges, requiring special thought to be paid to their design. Some manufactures cut the size of the shift key on their netbook’s keyboards, causing headaches and consumers had to retain themselves on how to type correctly.

Lenovo, maker of the ThinkPad, has been studying keyboard usage by installing keylogger software on volunteer’s laptops. Armed with this data, they’ve decided to make two small changes to the layout. The escape and delete keys are now twice as tall, which accommodates typists who tend to reach up to the keys instead of out to them, increasing efficiency and decreasing accidental taps.

Lenovo readily admits this layout isn’t perfect, considering that the caps lock key, bane of anyone on the receiving end of an email shouted at them and arguably the most useless key on a keyboard, still exists. Of course, intrepid users have learned how to remap the caps lock key to something more useful, like an extra command key or some fort of auto-script. Either way, we’ll probably never leave the QWERTY layout, so any finessing, no matter how small, is always welcome.