Yearly Archives: 2010

XOs & sOccket & World Cup

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As weeping and cheering for today’s World Cup results spread across the globe, at OLPC we are hoping to recover enough to try sOccket’s power-generating soccer ball at our next weekly scrimmage. Since Ghana and Uruguay are XO countries we are exhausted from rooting for both sides.

Yesterday, Jessica Lin from sOccket visited us at OLPC and promised to trade a sOccket ball for an XO, in hopes that someday a XO can be powered by the energy of play.  Learning in play was strong thread of discussion this week at OLPC. We talked to Jessica about 60+ soccer programs around the world (like the Kabul Girls Soccer Club) that help children learn about teamwork, strategy, physics, and statistics as they participate in their favorite sport. Right to Play was another kindred program we met at the UNRWA education conference, which sparked a brainstorming session about how computer games could be incorporated into RTP programs.

So, start up your XOs!  Track stats of the World Cup games, Measure the amplitude of cheering when a goal is scored, or Record a set of videos of your friend’s elaborate soccer footwork!

We all have the right to learn & play…

Pixel Qi hack kit on display at MakerSHED

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Make and Pixel Qi are (finally) offering a 10.1′ Pixel Qi hacking kit for $275.

It is guaranteed to work smoothly with the Samsung N130 and Lenovo S10-2 netbooks. You can coax it into working well on many other machines with a 10.1′ display, but it may not always be a perfect fit. If you try it on another model, let us and the Make folks know how well it fits.

Congrats to the Make team for making this available! I can’t wait to try this out on a few spare machines. Of course Bernie’s TwoHundredDollarLaptop has a much larger sunlight-readable display…

Radio Free XO

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Best of Luck to Team One Beep (http://tiny.cc/flay5) next week as they compete in the final international round of the MS Imagine Cup. Their success in transmitting content over FM radio frequencies to an XO is a nice partial solution. Connectivity is a forever problem.

As OLPC continues to develop programs in areas where infrastructure is subject to frequent disruption from natural or man-made causes its use as a communication device is full of possibilities. For the past few months we have been participating in the Global Education Cluster and INEE to position olpc as a solution in the recovery and reconstruction phases of emergencies. Perhaps more significantly olpc has a place in the mitigation and pre-disaster preparation. FM Radio is an effective way to get information and instructions out during emergencies and less likely than Internet service to get knocked-out. XOs plus cheap USB FM radio receivers makes for a great combination for receiving educational content and critical information.

Now if someone can figure out how to make the XO an FM transmitter too…

Juliano on Rwanda

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The Global Center for Laptops and Learning in Kigali has been updating their blog recently. This past week, Brazil and Rwanda students met via Skype for the first time.

Juliano Bittencourt, who spent a year in Rwanda with his wife, recently posted a lovely email about Rwanda developments to the OLPC Brasil mailing list.

He points to Silvia Kist’s personal blog (in Portuguese) as a source for more information about the work there, along with the ‘laptop learning’ photostream.

OLPC Photo Galleries

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“The photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” -Diane Arbus

PaleXO West Bank IMG_1319

I am starting to appreciate how difficult it is to find compelling photographs that capture the spirit of learning. How do you represent collaboration and learning by doing? Basic interactions among children are often similar across different environments — with features and dress and surroundings the greatest change from town to town. But collaboration can happen between students sitting next to each other, across the room, or kilometers away… Great photography captures and makes you wonder about what is not seen in the image.

Some of the more exciting images are of children discovering something new on an XO; or share with their neighbors something they have discovered. I love to see their looks of delirium:
PaleXO West Bank 147

There is a beautifully lit image of a student posing with her laptop, the water stained ceiling of the classroom telling of the need for a new roof:
Girl_with_xo_classroom_Sierra_Leone

Or the picture of children on the steps of a red clay mud dwelling exploring together, with a yak grazing in the foreground.

OLE Nepal cover

We have a new Flickr gallery of photographs of children learning in deployments, where you can see more as they are submitted. If you have a great set of photos from your own deployment, please post a link to it.

Ceibal high-school project update

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An update on Uruguay’s deployment of olpc in high schools: Plan Ceibal has posted some details and images of the laptops that will be used in this project. Some schools will use the new blue XO-HS laptops, and others will use Magellans — the only implementation of the Classmate design that has been used in large scale deployments (in Portugal and Venezuela).

You can see their take on a feature comparison of the machines. While there’s no check box for “sunlight-readable screen”, robustness, or power management, it’s a good look at how schools perceive their options. I would be glad to see classrooms worldwide adopting any platform like this — both can share the same software and materials.