Category Archives: Community

TuxPaint contest for kids, with Sugary prizes

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The Tux Paint dev team last week announced a 2011 summer drawing contest, with prizes including three OLPC XO-1’s, Sugar-on-a-Stick drives, and TuxPaint shirts.  All children 3-12 are encouraged to submit their best Tux Paint art; the best 10 drawings will receive prizes. The contest is sponsored and judged by the retail company Worldlabel, which will showcase the winning art on their blog.

HOW TO ENTER:

  • Download Tux Paint
  • Make your drawing in Tux Paint and save it in png format
  • Send your finished drawing in png format to worldlabel@gmail.com and include “Tux Paint” in the email subject line
  • In the email submission include: 1) the artist’s’ name 2) the artist’s age 3) the title of drawing 4) the country where the artist lives
  • All artwork must be the contestant’s original work created on Tux Paint.
  • Only one entry per child

Entries will be judged on the quality and originality of the artwork. Extra points will be given to drawings that tell a story.

Entries must be submitted by midnight USA Easter Standard time on 12 September 2011. Winners will be announced no later than 22 September 2011. All entries will be licensed: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported and will be exhibited on this page.

Kudos to Russell Ossendryver and the other devs who keep Tux Paint one of the best drawing activities out there.

A trek across Africa to support students

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Tamin-Lee Connolly plans to travel from South-to-North across Africa, ending in the middle-east, visiting schools and helping to deploy laptops along the way. She may even bring some of her own. Today she begins her travel by flying back to her native South Africa from Dubai, where she has been working, launching a year-long journey by land rover to visit 39 countries. She plans to volunteer for OLPC and perhaps other educational groups along the way, and has been talking to grassroots XO deployments to find those that would benefit from a visit – starting with the amazing team in Kliptown!

If you’re working in Africa, drop her a line on her travel blog, everything except the horn – perhaps you can meet up during her trek.

Marshall Islands prepare for OLPC deployment with national workshop

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As noted on the OLPC Oceania blog last week, the Marshall Islands is the latest nation to receive new XOs through OLPC Oceania.

Oceania continues to be a model for solid deployments. The Marshall Islands project has a clear project document and technology plan, and is moving steadily towards implementing them. Last week the national team held an educators workshop with teachers from across the region, and Mike Hutak and Ian Thompson.

Acting Minister of Education Mattlan Zackhras encouraged all teachers to take advantage of the workshop so that everyone in the islands could benefit from the program. As he said at the opening ceremony,

“By bridging the digital divide to an inclusive global community, our students here in the islands can share ideas with other students in the Pacific and from around world“.

OLPC and FabFi mesh networks bring Internet to Afghanistan

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OLPC is working in 9 schools and 5 cities in Afghanistan. Many of the schools have some limited Internet connectivity at home, but most families still don’t have Internet (though they may get GPRS coverage if they have access to a cell phone) in their neighborhoods or home compounds.

In Jalalabad, this is changing in part thanks to a mesh network run by FabLab Jalalabad. Through their FabFi network, many children with XOs and their families have access to the Internet (and Wikipedia) for the first time. Fast Company wrote up a good story on this, following the New York Times’s lead last Sunday (commentary).

Similar FabLabs with mesh networks have sprung up elsewhere, most notably in Kenya. I hope to see them spread more widely in Africa and Asia – it seems like a robust and scalable model for engaging communities in maintaining their own networks.

Narrative Interfaces for OLPC

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This Friday at 2pm EST, Scott and others will talk about how OLPC creates student-centric learning experiences, and how the software stack could become less shallow in terms of providing a narrative and journey to those experiences.

Those interested in joining are welcome to come to OLPC’s new offices at the American Twine building for the discussion. There will be streamed and higher-res posted video of the sessions as well. See Dr. Ananian’s blog for further details.

Rasha Hussein shares her journey with OLPC in Ramallah

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Rasha Hussein writes on the TEDx Ramallah blog about her journey with OLPC and PaleXO over the past year in Ramallah, and how she was welcomed to the group by Noura Salhi and found friends and collaborators, and inspiration to join a new startup (Bazinga) with others from that group.

I learned the true meaning of voluntary work, and I felt awesome about what I do. It’s been a year now, and it was the best year of my life!

Kudos to her for sharing this experience.  For more about the Bazinga technology hub, you can also follow them on twitter.

If you have been involved with an olpc project in your community, let us know what it was like —  we would love to hear from you.