Health Mapping & Education in Emergencies: Exploring New Opportunities for Child Learning and Well-being

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At OLPC this morning Rumi Chunara, PhD, a Research Fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School gave an inspiring introduction to her work - http://healthmap.org/en/. It’s a live site that tracks global health issues through local submissions — tracking needs that are pressing a community most direly.

OLPC has been conducting research and fieldwork that focuses on education for children in crises, cutting across areas of crucial needs such as health and shelter. The effects of tools like Health Map and Ushahidi linked to an XO for family and kid support can have untold benefits for providing life saving information to a community. Health Maps can be localized for region and epidemic and we hope to collaborate further on what information can be provided through the forum for XO users in environments at risk across the world.

Informal learning for children is at the core of One Laptop per Child. Recently, Health Maps used their tools to track school closures in the United States as a result of the H1N1 epidemic – by linking school closures with the informal learning opportunities facilitated by the XO we aspire to facilitate uninterrupted access to education for all of the world’s children!

Click here for Rumi’s full presentation!

New Assessment Report on M&E Literature

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OLPC learns and grows from every distribution, small or large, and actively seeks out feedback, documentation and analysis. OLPC partners and communities are critical contributors in this feedback loop and likewise are usually interested in how monitoring and evaluation studies from different countries can offer insight into successes and challenges of one laptop per child programs. The learning team decided to compile an assessment report of the existing m&e literature to compare different projects, generate discussion, and gain inspiration. Check it out!

If you have your own overview of an OLPC project not featured please consider sharing for future updates to our assessment report!

Building Technical Support in Afghanistan

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With roughly 4,000 laptops deployed, we’re still in the beginning stages of the initiative. It’s a good stage to be in, especially for building our technical support in advance. So what’s the best way of doing that?

One idea that has been proposed:  setting up partnerships with students at Afghan universities. We’d recruit teams of student volunteers to provide ongoing support to teachers and pilot projects. Throughout the whole process, OLPC would provide ongoing support, feedback, access to spare parts and technical advice.  Of course there are still a lot of details to iron out.  Right now we’re planning to call it the Afghanistan Children’s Connectivity Project, involving individual Connectivity Centers in community hubs in each region.

This year, the United States Government requested $105.9 billion for military operations in Afghanistan. The numbers break down into $68.1 billion requested by the Department of Defense for 2010 and a $33 billion supplement requested by the Administration to support the 30,000 person troop surge in the area. It’s funny to think that providing every child in the country with an XO would cost about $800 million — or 3 days of that military spending.

The New XO-1.5 HS: a blue, blue world

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Part 2 of a review of the XO-1.5

Over 90,000 Uruguayan high school students will receive a new XO-1.5 HS (High School edition) laptop.  So how is it different from the XO-1 that their younger classmates have?

From the outside, the XO-1.5 HS has the same feel — it’s the same size, and the same antenna ears… though they feel different somehow in dark blue.  The color variation on the backplate is more limited — there may be just one set of colors to match the dark blue casing.

To make it easier to use for high school students, the keyboard features larger keys for larger fingers — and it’s now a standard responsive, ‘clicky’ keyboard rather than a waterresistant membrane. Its light/dark blue color scheme represents Uruguay’s national colors, more subtler than the bright green of the other XOs.

Since we redesigned the keyboard, we took the opportunity to make a few other handy changes. The new keyboard screws in and pops out without dismantling the bottom of the XO — taking 2 minutes rather than 15 to swap one out.

I tried it myself during my first XO teardown – the keyboard was probably the easiest thing for me to get out. We did a half tear down and photographed it, so we can also add guidelines for upgrading your disk on the 1.5’s motherboard. And now people seem to be making hybrids of XO-1.5s with the new keyboard (see our Flickr stream for more). I’ll post again when the new repair guide section is ready.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/olpc/sets/72157624651637076/

Papua New Guinea’s Jim Taylor Primary School

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Earlier this month, Laura Hosman, an assistant professor following OLPC,  wrote an eloquent two-part series about her visit to the Jim Taylor Primary School in Kisap, Papua New Guinea, an hour’s drive from Mount Hagen.  This has the potential to be one of our most interesting rural deployments — and well run, as are all of the Oceania projects.  It is interesting to see how they are using their casually-scattered solar panel array.

XO power data: power draws for plugged-in laptops

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Guest post by Richard Smith

We’ve finished testing power consumption while plugged into a 230V ac wall outlet for the XO-1 and the XO-1.5. The new machine performs well while suspended, and suspends very smoothly.   The 1.5 charges faster and using less power to charge the same battery.  It also draws slightly more power when in high use, thanks to its variable CPU.

See the chart below, which includes the power draw of the AC adapter.  Battery-only numbers will be significantly lower, in particular for idle and suspend, but are a bit harder to measure cleanly.  There is no comparison chart for that yet.

Power draw at the wall (XO + adapter + backlight)

Scenario XO-1 XO-1.5
Full charge 56 Wh 47 Wh
Idle 8.5W 7.2W
High 9.5W 9.7W
Suspend 5.2W 2.85W
  • Full Charge: The amount of energy it takes to completely charge a dead battery, using an adapter (power needed for bulk charging of batteries may differ).
  • Idle: Laptop sitting at the Sugar home screen, with power management disabled, backlight on full, charging.
  • High: Laptop running the Record activity’s “preview” mode.  Power management disabled, backlight on full, charging.
  • Suspend: Laptop with power management enabled, suspended, charging.

Calculating low-power options:

  • The backlight draws close to 1W – you can shave that off of the idle and high numbers turning it off.
  • Most of the power draw on suspend is to the adapter – you could view that as an upper bound on how much to factor out of the other numbers for battery-only power usage.