Access to the Internet has tripled in the interior of Uruguay, and 85% of all children use the Internet, according to a recent study by Radar and Antel. 40% of them visit one of the official national educational or informational sites at least once a day. That’s pretty fly.
Marco Fioretti interviewed Bernie in Paraguay about his ongoing work there. From the interview:
The main reason of my work in this country was to bring our end users as close as possible to the developers: our development model cannot work without quick feedback from the trenches. Luckily, I found a lot of talent and interest for programming among the young people of Caacupè. Last March I started to meet some of them them every week to teach them how to develop software for Sugar. We call this the “Caacupé hackfest” and it’s going pretty well.
It’s a nice followup to the XO customization posted last month.
The La Rioja pilot is underway, with the first of 60,000 XOs being distributed and field reports coming in from reactivated’s Daniel Drake. Local news are reporting on the need to bring laptops to places where noone comes, and the value of Sugar to young learners.
The latest article in La Nacion includes an intro video by Ariel Torres about the OLPC project, with a nice Wikipedia cameo.
OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.
In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation. Â I am curious as to how it will turn out. Â Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school. Â They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work. Â They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.
Two girls with custom XOs
Customized Sugar desktop
The Paraguay deployment has been growing quickly, with help from OLPC world-traveller Bernie Innocenti. Students there are trying out the latest build of Sugar (0.84), with its dual-desktop (Gnome and Sugar). They are the first school to test out recent efforts to backport that release to the XO-1. Their motivation to install the update? They absolutely love the GNOME desktop backgrounds and screensavers.
They also are expert at customizing their XOs, with stickers, screennames that span many lines to make ascii art, and iconic backgrounds (using the freeform icon layout). Bernie also reports on the programs they use most, and on how they are learning to modify the software on their machines.
For regular updates from the field, and lessons in English and Spanish computer slang, follow along on his travelog.
Ready for vampires
Batovi Games Studio, a game development company headquartered in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, recently released a long mini-game, Super Vampire Ninja Zero, for the XO. This is the most recent game being developed in parallel for the XO and the desktop PC. Batovi has been around since 2005 and has recently begun expanding to new platforms. It is great to see their handiwork running within Sugar.
Bernie reports that SVNZ is currently a hit in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as among ninjas. It may be the most polished XO game release since Sim City for the XO came out. Now if only their forces were combined… perhaps in Vampires Take Micropolis, Online Edition?
Update: parents and teachers are often unhappy that their children play games. No less Doom and SVNZ. I sympathize with this. I also remember how a love for games taught me how much you could do with a computer (and how that was my first impetus to program something — how awesome to be able to make something it’s fun to watch others play!). This is part of the genius of Scratch – it combines the sharable joy of games and animations with an easy learning curve for discovering algorithms and techniques.