Tag Archives: activity

GoGoNews kids’ news activity to ship with Sugar

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GoGoNews, a site providing news summaries for kids, is developing an XO activity to showcase their news.   Like the older NewsReader activity, it will offer regular updates from its online feed.   OLPC plans to ship the activity with future XOs, in English and Spanish.

The activity is scheduled to be done by February.  GoGoNews founder Golnar Khosroshawi says of the project “Together we will equip children with relevant technology and content, regardless of location, to promote learning and understanding, not just of academics, but of people, countries and cultures.”

For details, see the press release in English and Spanish.

TuxPaint contest for kids, with Sugary prizes

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The Tux Paint dev team last week announced a 2011 summer drawing contest, with prizes including three OLPC XO-1’s, Sugar-on-a-Stick drives, and TuxPaint shirts.  All children 3-12 are encouraged to submit their best Tux Paint art; the best 10 drawings will receive prizes. The contest is sponsored and judged by the retail company Worldlabel, which will showcase the winning art on their blog.

HOW TO ENTER:

  • Download Tux Paint
  • Make your drawing in Tux Paint and save it in png format
  • Send your finished drawing in png format to worldlabel@gmail.com and include “Tux Paint” in the email subject line
  • In the email submission include: 1) the artist’s’ name 2) the artist’s age 3) the title of drawing 4) the country where the artist lives
  • All artwork must be the contestant’s original work created on Tux Paint.
  • Only one entry per child

Entries will be judged on the quality and originality of the artwork. Extra points will be given to drawings that tell a story.

Entries must be submitted by midnight USA Easter Standard time on 12 September 2011. Winners will be announced no later than 22 September 2011. All entries will be licensed: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported and will be exhibited on this page.

Kudos to Russell Ossendryver and the other devs who keep Tux Paint one of the best drawing activities out there.

olpcMAP and Map-12.xo

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The latest version of the Map activity was released this month, and works smoothly with the XO-1.5 and with openstreetmap or google map data.

And olpcMAP has been updated to work with new features of the Google App Engine.   Check them both out!    HT to SaigonOLPC for publishing these monthly status summaries.

Red Hat sponsors RIT student work on XO activities for the Deaf

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Red Hat is sponsoring summer POSSE bootcamps (Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience), a brainchild of Mel’s, to introduce students to open source development and projects. Most POSSE projects have supported Fedora, Mozilla, or Sugar Labs in some fashion. At RIT, bootcamps this summer continue to build on the FOSS@RIT group’s efforts to develop tools that will support better hacking on tools for children in Sugar.

In particular, the group at RIT has been working for the past two years on tools to improve communication for deaf and hard of hearing children with XO laptops. Alumni of 2009 and 2010 workshops, bootcamps, and other events, worked with RIT’s Lab for Technological Literacy (LTL) and took a couple field trips to our Cambridge office, to develop a videochat activity with sufficient quality to support readable sign language over videochat.

It’s great to see this program thrive, and that OLPC and Sugar continue to be part of the motivation for some of the good work being planned.

Facebookopolis: Micropolis hits Facebook

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Micropolis has taken another step online, courtesy of Don Hopkins: It is now available as a Facebook App. Now you can enjoy this fabulous cellular-automatized and open source version of SimCity in-between tending your FarmVille crops.

This new app is in active development, so you may see changes over the coming days. For more on what Micropolis can do and where it is going, see this transcript of a talk Don Hopkins gave when MicropolisOnline first got underway.