Khürgülek Ondar, with help from OLPC-SF, is heading back to Tuva with XOs in hand and some Sugary ideas to share.  Sameer is helping maintain an OLPC Tuva project blog, and they are looking for help in localizing Sugar into Tuvan.
The excellent Kleider clan have been giving him some help… now I hope he finds someone from OLPC MN to meet with him there.
Team BUTIÃ from Uruguay has been working on an XO robotics project for over a year. They showed off their line-following XO-robot, butiabot, in Montevideo this weekend. An XO running TurtleArt code hooked up to a mobile robotic platform followed a dark line along the ground.
They have posted some details of their prototypes online.
This reminds me of the XO hack to control a Roomba over the Net, but cooler, with Turtle Art and a realtime-hackable control program.
Over 20 OLPC and Sugar collaborators are in Uruguay this week, visiting schools, meeting with the Uruguayan communities (ceibalJAM, RAP Ceibal, and the eduJAM event team), and preparing for the eduJAM! summit for Sugar developers and educators across Latin America.
The attendees are using a separate OLPC Uruguay 2011 blog for the week to track their various travels and projects in Uruguay. If you can’t be there yourself, you can follow along (and share your own questions for the group) here.
Last July 24, thousands of people all over the world submitted their videos to YouTube to share their lives, to participate in Life in one Day (La vida en un dia). This was an experimental bit of cinematography to create a documentary created entirely by YouTube users, capturing one day on Earth. Ten OLPC students from Peru took part, posting videos of their day for the project.
The film will be shown in theatres across the US this summer.
Here is the official trailer:
We’re hosting an olpcMAP discussion session at our Cambridge HQ on Wednesday night, with students (and future collaborators!) from Tufts. If you can’t be there, catch up on recent additions and developments to the project with this month’s olpcMAP update.
Meanwhile, mapping maven Nick Doiron shares the view from his seat in Montevideo, where he is a resident hacker this month with Plan Ceibal.
What a great meeting of 14 minds on Friday, March 11 at 6PM at OLPC office, One Cambridge Center (right above the Kendall/MIT Red-Line Stop), facing OLPC’s most serious challenges.
Meeting agenda:
One of the topics was about using eToys or Scratch to engage older kids and/or adults with programming. Nick Doiron summarized some ideas on this topic for the group:
There are a lot of ideas out there about how to do intro-to-programming and I like what people have done with eToys at the primary school level (if you haven’t seen Waveplace’s experiences in Haiti, read about them online! )
As you target middle school level students or above, they’re interested in the internet and media. Some are interested in technical details – ask any programmer you know when they started. You can make a high school kid an expert in eToys, but they won’t be any closer to making their own website or Space Invaders game. If you would give someone a power tool in shop class, you should give them a real programming language on the computer.
Mozilla’s Hackasaurus program is designed for learning HTML at this level. Two amazing workshops in the past month:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/at-hackasaurus-jam-mozilla-encourages-young-programmers-to-change-the-web/and http://brettgaylor.tumblr.com/post/3526122151/web-made-movies-at-bavcThey have information about setting up your own workshop at hackasaurus.org. Also, check out http://palpable-video.appspot.com/sample
This meeting had tremendous value for all participants as it presented an opportunity to connect to people who are interested in similar edu-tech ideas.