Category Archives: OLPC Latin America

Documenting life on Earth – Abel and his XO

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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.

Now all of the stories have been edited together into a single documentary.  The film was directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott.  National Geographic is helping with distribution.   Rick Smolan was also involved in the film’s development last year.   Since its global online premiere at Sundance, the documentary has been received enthusiastically at the Berlin and SXSW film festivals.

The film will be shown in theatres across the US this summer.

Here is the official trailer:

 

And here is the story of Abel, an 11-year old shoe shiner and one of Peruvian gen-XO children who took part – part of his video was included in the film, showing his life working on the street, and what he loves to read on Wikipedia. He and his father had the luck to be flown out to Sundance for the online premiere!
Hat tip to Mike Massey and OLPC Mexico.

Sugar Labs sponsors bike racing team to raise awareness

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Team Chipotle jersey

Sugar Labs is sponsoring professional cycling team Team Chipotle, alongside Garmin, cervelo, and others, to raise awareness about the Sugar Labs mission.

The question now is: will there be Team Chipotle swag at the Montevideo eduJAM next month?!

Illinois Institute updates charger design for Haiti schools

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The Illinois Institute of Technology is updating its design for solar chargers being used by OLPC schools in Haiti. Laura Hosman‘s students, working with Bruce Baikie of Green Wifi, are improving designs for charging setups for the off-grid primary schools in Haiti using XOs. Their work was featured recently in the Chicago Tribune.

They have been working on this project with Guy Serge Pompilus, the Haiti national project coordinator, since 2009 — and the focus on robust solar charging has increased greatly since the 2010 earthquakes.

Peru’s new XO assembly lines

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Peru has a large and complex XO project, certainly the most varied anywhere, with its mix of rural and urban, powered and off-grid. Now they are adding local assembly of future laptops, something many countries have considered but few have carried out.

As noted recently, local assembly offers shorter startup times for production, and gives the deploying country more of a stake in the ongoing project.
Peru is being supported directly by Quanta, our factory in China, in this. Similar arrangements will be a bit easier now that the first one is underway, but this sort of arrangement is hard to work out unless the deployment team is planning for a steady flow of hardware delivered over years.

Nevertheless, this is a great step for olpc sustainability. Between Peru’s interest in assembly, Uruguay’s recent interest in design for new audiences, and Paraguay’s interest in developing better software and OS builds, Latin American deployments are taking up shared ownership of most aspects of the project.

From their official announcement:
Continue reading →

April olpcMAP updates

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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.

Dextrose 2 is available for the XO

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Dextrose2, a revamp of the popular XOOS flavor developed by Activity Central and Sugar Labs, in partnership with Paraguay Educa, is now available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. It has a number of performance and other improvements, including 3G modem and connection sharing. I can’t wait to try it out on my old XO-1s.

Dextrose 2 by activity central

The original Dextrose build + activities that was released last fall was based closely on the latest XOOS release available at the time (OS 10). This version has one major difference from the main OS: it does not offer a traditional Linux desktop as an alternative to Sugar.  (Some students managed to delete their Sugar home directories from within their Gnome desktop, making work with Sugar difficult until they had reinstalled it.  As a result, some teachers asked to return to a Sugar-only system.)

This work is now formally supported by Plan Ceibal, which has started to use Dextrose in their schools. It is good to see this much attention being given to activity development and Spanish-language documentation, and to close feedback loops with teachers who use the latest tools every week with their students.

So don’t wait — download a copy of Dextrose2 and try it out!

NB: If you’re looking for the latest Dextrose with the Gnome desktop option added back in, you can request this on the sugar-devel mailing list. It’s on the list of versions to make, but not a high priority at the moment.