Category Archives: OLPC Latin America

eduJAM! planned in Montevideo, May 5-7

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This week a team led by Uruguay’s ceibalJAM! (including Gabriel Eirea, Pablo Flores, Gonzalo Odiard, Fernando Sansberro, and Andrés Ambrois) and including Walter, Adam, Christoph, and David Farning, made progress in organizing an education hacking summit in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The name of the event will be eduJAM! 2011 and will take place from Thu May 5 to Sat May 7. Please include the eduJAM! and ceibalJAM! logos below if blogging or writing about the event.

The main objective of the summit is to strengthen the free educational software developer community, with a focus on Latin America and the Sugar + olpc communities. The event will feature discussions around future directions and strategy, hacking on specific projects, and exchange of experiences among different deployments.  The event is being planned in more detail on the sugarlabs wiki.



Registration is not yet open.  Alongside the eduJAM! a couple of extra activities are being planned to make the most of the attendees gathering for the summit (we already know of people from 10 countries who will be there):

A “Conozco Uruguay Tour” is being organized by members of volunteer group RAP Ceibal and the OLPC community, between Sat April 30 and Thu May 5.

There will also be a Sugar code sprint starting Sunday May 8, right after the summit, expected to continue to Monday May 9 if not beyond!



Sponsors are welcome; Activity Central has already offered to be a sponsor, and the organizers are looking for other sponsors both at the national and international level.  We hope you can join us and are looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

Blast from the Past: OLPC v. Classmate on Argentine TV

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Last April, “In Tecno” compared the OLPC (‘of Uruguay, where it is in all primary schools’) and the Classmate (‘of Argentina, where it is in all 4th, 5th, and 6th grades’).  It’s one of the few direct comparisons I’ve seen recorded, and worth watching.

Since then, Argentina has expanded its program to cover all primary schools as well – the largest deployment of laptops in primary schools in the world.   It has also had one province (La Rioja) experiment with 60,000 OLPCs instead of Classmates.  It is great to see Latin America embracing the idea of olpc so throughly; I hope that Argentina’s enthusiasm and successes give confidence to their neighbors, such as Bolivia and Brazil.

Hope and Josh and Peru

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Hope and Josh, two interns who worked in Peru last year, shared an imaginative and colorful blog of their experiences over the fall, full of photographs of the people and the environment, and short vignettes about teaching. (Sugarcane and Squares, the Repaso).  Their blog is terse, and worth reading all the way through.


TEDxRio : Rodrigo on OLPC and viewing children as our future

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Rodrigo Arboleda spoke about OLPC at TEDxRio this week to a crowd of 800, with 7000 people watching online.  The conference was a big hit in the Brazilian blogosphere, and one of the top trending topics in the world that day.  TEDx has really captured the essence of TED without much of the overhead, and it’s great to see it flourish.  Everyone there felt they were discussing how to contribute to human knowledge and development, and they left wondering how they could follow up on the event in more rural parts of the country – a great audience for an olpc talk.

The session will be up online soon, and you should watch it; for now, an image from the floor:

Rodrigo speaking at TEDxRio

"Children are a mission, not a market"

Anje Breitkopf on her fieldwork in Peru

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Anje recently wrote about her travels and fieldwork in Peru, and presented the report to DIGETE, one of the administrators of the Peru’s OLPC program. She was kind enough to ensure that both Spanish and English versions of her work were available online. It is a balanced reflection on the program, with some insights to reward the patient reader. This is not her final report, and I hope to see more from her before she moves on.

Happy new year

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Happy new year to the OLPC community around the world!  Thank you for your part in everything we have accomplished in 2010 – from our new initiatives in Gaza, Argentina, and Nicaragua to expansion of work in Peru, Uruguay, Rwanda, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Haiti.

Special thanks to everyone who has worked on the newest iterations of Sugar, and those who put on the grassroots events over the past year in the Virgin Islands, San Francisco, and Uruguay — all of which has helped connect some of our smaller projects and realize some of their educational dreams in new activities.  We’ve launched our new website for the year, highlighting the stories from these and other deployments; this blog may merge into that site as well (and you can see blog posts appearing in its News section).