Category Archives: Technology

St. Kitts and Nevis to give laptops to all high school students

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Last week, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas announced an expansion of its (lowercase) olpc program to cover all high school students. The program is sponsored by Taiwan, and focuses on knowledge-sharing, creativity, and empowerment of students.

Glenn Phillip, Minister of Youth Empowerment, told the St. Kitts and Nevis National Assembly:

“In his foresight the Prime Minister did not just require that each student is provided with a laptop, but rather that each student receives a tool that could help shape them into productive citizens, innovative thinkers, problem solvers, a new breed of citizen, equipped to form part of a Knowledge Society.”

That’s the sort of international partnership the world could use more of.

Reflections on Sugar from Santa Cruz, Bolivia

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Mentors from the Santa Cruz have started an ‘education alternative’ project and creativity center at a Children’s Home aiming to combine younger students with university students studying programming. They started working with 9-year olds on XOs and with Sugar, and after a few months have moved to working with 6-year olds and older students.

They offer some early feedback on using Sugar and Etoys in afterschool projects, and are working on engaging teachers and starting some programming projects. I look forward to seeing their reflections at the end of this season.

0.3% of XOs run Windows

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A stray comment today about Windows not working on ARM machines, by someone who thought all OLPC laptops had moved away from Linux, reminded me to reaffirm something:

Every one of the 2M+ XOs we’ve ever made shipped from the factory with Linux. As far as I know, under 7,000 XOs have ever run Windows natively* – some 0.3% of all laptops we have ever produced. Most of those dual-booted into both Sugar and Windows XP, as part of programs sponsored independently by Microsoft. I know of a few teachers that had those machines in at least one class, but have never seen reports from a class using them — if you know of one of these schools, I would be most interested to hear about the experience — particularly from schools that used both OSes.

The XO community around the world includes one of the largest deployments of Linux to primary students anywhere in the world. This is something we can all be proud of.


* To be fair: running Windows in emulation through wine or SugaredWine is quite popular for certain activities.  Three cheers for the wine team’s excellent work!

Peru to deploy XO-1.75s this year, passing 1M laptops in all

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Peru’s president Alan Garcia today committed to expanding their national program, the largest in the world, including developing national facilities for manufacturing / assembling laptops in-country. They will distribute their 1 millionth XO by the end of the year, reaching students in 100% of the country’s public primary schools, and 15 percent of all registered public school students. Some of these schools will get XO-1.75s, and 20,000 schools will get additional LEGO WeDo kits for use in class robotics programs. The XO-1.75 will use a Marvell Armada 600 ARM chip, lowering power consumption to make it the most energy efficient laptop around.

Rodrigo Arboleda said of the latest announcement: “Being the largest deployment worldwide, Peru is an outstanding example of OLPC. We hope to see other countries establish manufacturing facilities of the scale and magnitude of Peru’s. Local manufacturing of XO laptops will enable Peru both to transform education and to make important investments in its economy.”

Peru is continuing its efforts to build software, content, and ideas for constructionist class work. Through their ongoing partnership with LEGO Education, they will finish distributing 92,000 LEGO WeDo kits to OLPC classrooms in Peru, and will develop related robotics and programming curriculum for younger students.
 
And the Peru Ministry of Education continues to invest in developing new Sugar applications and learning games for their own schools and others, assisted by OLPC’s global volunteer community (eg. Somos Azúcar) finishing translations of Sugar into Aymara and Quechua, and translating a teacher’s curriculum guide — most recently into French for schools in Madagascar.

I hope to get an update from some of these devs at the upcoming eduJAM! summit in Uruguay.

Exploring New Technologies

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cscott just rejoined our team from distant lands, to much rejoicing.  His first blog post covers his work this month to explore of software development paths for the XO-3. Welcome back!

XO-3 design

Last Monday I rejoined One Laptop Per Child as Director, New Technologies. My mandate is hardware and software for the XO-3, OLPC’s upcoming ARM-based tablet computer for education in the developing world. The new machine should be lower cost, lower power, more indestructible, more powerful, and potentially more expandable than ever. There are about two million machines in the XO-1 family (XO-1, XO-1.5) in the hands of kids today. The XO-3 will build upon this impressive foundation to reach further into the poorest and least-connected regions of the world.

I will kick-off my work with a series of four week-long sprints between now and eduJAM Uruguay to investigate possible directions for the educational software stack on the XO-3 tablet. On the XO-1 machines, OLPC ships Sugar, an impressive collection of educational software developed by Sugar Labs. How can we keep the best of Sugar while yanking the UI forward into a touch-friendly tablet world?

  1. This week (April 4-8) I’ll begin by working on a port of the GTK3 UI library to Android. The GTK3 library contains touch support missing from the GTK2 library (on which Sugar is currently based). The goal here is a port of the Python/GTK-based Sugar APIs, running on something like the Honeycomb Android OS.  Existing educational activities could be ported to new APIs without much difficulty, but we’d largely use existing Android OS facilities instead of Sugar’s low-level system management.  This is a preliminary exploration—we haven’t decided to base tablet software on Android (or anything else) yet.
  2. The week of April 11-15 I will start porting Python/GTK3 to Chrome or ChromeOS via the Google NativeClient plugin. This path would result in activities which more fully integrate with web technologies—even in disconnected regions of the world. On desktop machines, Sugar activities could run inside the Chrome browser, while ChromeOS (or another embedded OS running chrome/webkit) would provide system management functions on tablets like the XO-3. As with the Android port, this is exploration, not a definite software direction.
  3. The week of April 18-22 I hope to focus on mesh networking. This has a checkered history in our deployments; I hope to identify remaining roadblocks and map a way forward to make this a flagship feature of the XO-3.
  4. The week of April 25-29 is for the existing Python-based Sugar codebase. To continue moving forward, it needs to migrate to GTK3, gobject-introspection, and other key enabling technologies. It would also benefit from language-independent APIs and better modularization, to allow a more incremental migration path.

The following week is Conozco Uruguay and the Uruguay EduJAM — where I’ll present progress on these exploratory projects and discuss the path ahead with the OLPC and Sugar communities.  A week is not enough time to finish any of these projects! But the focused effort should help to identify the promise, roadblocks, and challenges in each path, which will help us plan the future.

What motivates education revolution?

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Ian Quillen writes in Education Week about the varying motivations and sponsors of major global edutech projects. He notes the work of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay (with OLPC) and Kennisnet in the Netherlands (with OpenWijs and related programs), in addition to projects driven in part by for-profit corporations.

I will add a link to a free version of the story when I find one.