Tag Archives: paraguay

OLPC Congratulates Founder of Paraguay Educa

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Congratulations to Cecilia Rodriguez Alcala, who was selected as the MBA Student of the Year Award by the Association of MBAs at Tufts University in the United States!

Cecilia is the founder of Paraguay Educa, an NGO which created the first digital city in Paraguay through the implementation of the One Laptop per Child program in the city of Caacupé.  Her important work has resulted in the provision of laptops, training and connectivity to 10,000 children in Paraguay. On behalf of OLPC, we send our gratitude and congratulations!

To read more about Cecilia and this award click here.

Here a video where Cecilia provides more details about here experience with Paraguay Educa:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2GUpTiYDe_4

 

1 in 20 Latin American children use an OLPC laptop

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There are roughly 58 million primary school students in Latin America, according to UNESCO’s latest data from their Education For All initiative.   5% of children in that age range are not in school.  And 5% of them use XOs: 1.5 million children have their own, and Peru’s urban initiative is giving another 1.5 million students in urban schools access to XOs through a program where groups of 3-5 students share a laptop.

 

Today 4/5 of these students are in Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, and Mexico.   But new programs are growing rapidly, in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and elsewhere.

That’s a lot of budding Pythonistas, Scratcheros, and Linux users!
Now if only my own home country would start providing computers and connectivity to its students as a matter of course…

Winning video selected in OLPC Stories contest

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OLPC and Nickelodeon have selected the winner of the OLPC Stories contest: fourth-grader Giuliana Violetta Pozzoli Daiub, age 10, from the class of Liliana Ortega in Paraguay.

You can see the winning submission, a Scratch animation, featuring a narrator, SpongeBob, neon lights, and an XO on a dance floor.

As the contest winner, Giuliana will be attending the 2011 Halo Awards organized by MTV and Nickelodeon in LA next month. Congratulations to her and to the other four finalists on their work. Asked what message she would send to other children, she thanked her parents and teacher for supporting her, and said ‘always remember that with your XO and imagination you can be who you want to be and realize your dreams!’ (recordar siempre que con tu Xo e imaginación puedes ser quien quieras ser y lograr todo lo que sueñas!)

Peru’s new XO assembly lines

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Peru has a large and complex XO project, certainly the most varied anywhere, with its mix of rural and urban, powered and off-grid. Now they are adding local assembly of future laptops, something many countries have considered but few have carried out.

As noted recently, local assembly offers shorter startup times for production, and gives the deploying country more of a stake in the ongoing project.
Peru is being supported directly by Quanta, our factory in China, in this. Similar arrangements will be a bit easier now that the first one is underway, but this sort of arrangement is hard to work out unless the deployment team is planning for a steady flow of hardware delivered over years.

Nevertheless, this is a great step for olpc sustainability. Between Peru’s interest in assembly, Uruguay’s recent interest in design for new audiences, and Paraguay’s interest in developing better software and OS builds, Latin American deployments are taking up shared ownership of most aspects of the project.

From their official announcement:
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Dextrose released for the XO

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Paraguay’s national deployment, run by Paraguay Educa, has been developing its own build of a Sugar operating system for its students, with help from Sugarlabs. They are calling it Dextrose. The newly-formed Activity Central group, a Sugar-development consultancy, is helping with this work, and supporting some local developers in Paraguay.

Dextrose is a spin of the core Sugar build that will focus on teacher tools and content in Spanish.
While initially developed with feedback from classrooms in Paraguay, this will hopefully become a platform that other deployments in Latin America can use. While Peru has been shy about frequent software upgrades, preferring to have something stable for years at a time, Uruguay and other smaller deployments are good candidates to start using Dextrose as well.

Updated XO software: “180py”

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Bernie Innocenti and the team in Paraguay have released build 180py of their Fedora 11 + Sugar desktop. It is fast, offers both Sugar and Gnome desktops, and includes many recent features from the past year into a build that isn’t too large.

Some call it ‘the best XO OS ever’ – and it is indeed fantastic. Everyone who has an XO-1 should download this build and try it out. (but don’t forget to back up your files and any customized activities first!)

At the same time, Sugar 0.88 is being designed to work on both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5, and is currently available for testing and development. Bernie needs help with finding “a more pronounceable name than F11-0.88” – describing the combination of Sugar 0.88 and stock Fedora 11 – so once more, please share any good naming conventions. If your name is chosen, I will personally ship you one of the near-mythical Red XOs.