Brian Barrett at Gizmodo, which has followed the XO-3 development quite closely, published a detailed hands-on review of the first prototype from CES.
It is a lovely review, well worth the read. His crew also took some fantastic photographs of the tablet in action:
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A great stories from Eshibinga, Kenya, last year:
In April Mr. Juma came to Eshibinga to teach us on how to use an xo laptop. His teaching is helping us now. We got two new computers today. Then our teacher Mr. Peter told us to remember some of the things we were taught.
I just remembered one word. Sugar. We were told that sugar is the operating system for the XO. It organizes the systems that run the clock, activates the Activities, and store the Journal entries. The Terminal Activity runs text-based commands for your XO instead of the Sugar graphical commands.
What nobody has told us is , why did they name it sugar? Why not give it a name like coffee, or milk or water?
Please tell me?
Mary, Eshibinga Primary
OLE Nepal has focused on health activities for some years now. Recently they undertook a project to develop a suite of them with educators from the UN’s World Food Program. In their August newsletter they announced that project’s successful conclusion:
OLE Nepal has completed the development of interactive digital learning activities designed to promote awareness in agriculture, food security and nutrition amongst school children. This set of thirty activities were developed with support from [the WFP] and are correlated with the Grade 5 “Science, Health and Physical Education” subject prescribed by the national curriculum.
OLE Nepal developed the activities in both Nepali and English. [They] have already been integrated in OLE Nepal’s larger E-Paath activity suite, and distributed to all OLPC program schools.
This is great news. Now we just need to upload them to the Sugarlabs Activities Hub and help get them localized into more languages. The E-Paath bundle and wiki pages could use updates as well.
A GTK/Sugar hackfest (a bit smaller and more focused than the Paris SugarCamp) will be held in Prague at the brmlab, from October 28-30. The hackfest agenda is under development on the sugarlabs wiki.
Separate from the national program being rolled out in Eastern Ghana, Princeton University has a student-run Ghana School Library Initiative which is building a physical library in Ghana stocked with books and OLPCs. This program started in 2008, and is one of three projects coordinated by the Princeton University chapter of Engineers Without Borders. They shared an update with East Coast OLPCers this Spring, and have been writing about their new milestones this summer, as the library nears completion.
After some work earlier this year to repair and update some donated XOs, children have started working with their own laptops at the EP Basic school in Ashaiman, Ghana, where the team is working. They recently completed a week of physical construction and two classes a day with the students. The classes included working on educational activities with the children in Sugar, “to whet their appetites” to use the XOs more on their own.
reposted on behalf of OLPC France
Registration is now open for the 2nd SugarCamp Paris. Please join us in making Sugar a better learning experience!
This event is organized by OLPC France, and takes place in Paris, France from September 9 (evening) to September 11 (evening).
The goal is to enhance Sugar as a free learning platform, already used by ~2M kids around the
world, and to focus on a specific problem: how to make Sugar *documentation* better with respect to accessibility and readability?Partial travel refunds are available for regional trips for those who could not otherwise come. Please contact the organizers with any questions.
Let’s take this challenge, and enjoy a good time with many members of the OLPC/Sugar community!
A recent CSM article about getting young people involved in programming and hacking (noting both OLPC and Raspberry Pi) quotes Rodrigo on students’ accomplishments in Uruguay:
“Debugging a program is the most perfect way of learning… We have already 12-year-old children in Uruguay that are proficient programmers. You cannot imagine the stuff we are beginning to see in these young kids.“
As mavrothal notes, you can download and install the latest candidate, os870, or you can update from the command line ( sudo olpc-update candidate-870 ) as long as you have 450MB of free space.
Since you can now run most Linux applications that have been packaged for Fedora 14, you may want to use an SD card for swap space.
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.
Khürgülek Ondar, with help from OLPC-SF, is heading back to Tuva with XOs in hand and some Sugary ideas to share. Sameer is helping maintain an OLPC Tuva project blog, and they are looking for help in localizing Sugar into Tuvan.
The excellent Kleider clan have been giving him some help… now I hope he finds someone from OLPC MN to meet with him there.
The eduJAM! convocation is going strong, with 2-3 days of Sugar camp and discussion among developers and teachers from across the world. Keep an eye on the ceibalJAM site in the coming days for videos and notes from the event.
You can browse some of the presentations on the edujam2011 slideshare account.
eduJAM! invitacion
Over 20 OLPC and Sugar collaborators are in Uruguay this week, visiting schools, meeting with the Uruguayan communities (ceibalJAM, RAP Ceibal, and the eduJAM event team), and preparing for the eduJAM! summit for Sugar developers and educators across Latin America.
The attendees are using a separate OLPC Uruguay 2011 blog for the week to track their various travels and projects in Uruguay. If you can’t be there yourself, you can follow along (and share your own questions for the group) here.
OLPC Australia has released an update to their USB ‘toolkit’ for XOs, a collection of software on a USB thumb drive designed to assist in recovery, repair, and support scenarios. The new version is ready for testing, and Sridhar expects only documentation changes between now and its final release.
The XO-AU USB is OLPC Australia’s official means of delivering updates and troubleshooting tools to schools.
Dextrose2, a revamp of the popular XOOS flavor developed by Activity Central and Sugar Labs, in partnership with Paraguay Educa, is now available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. It has a number of performance and other improvements, including 3G modem and connection sharing. I can’t wait to try it out on my old XO-1s.
The original Dextrose build + activities that was released last fall was based cexercise/>losely on the latest XOOS release available at the time (OS 10). This version has one major difference from the main OS: it does not offer a traditional Linux desktop as an alternative to Sugar. (Some students managed to delete their Sugar home directories from within their Gnome desktop, making work with Sugar difficult until they had reinstalled it. As a result, some teachers asked to return to a Sugar-only system.)
This work is now formally supported by Plan Ceibal, which has started to use Dextrose in their schools. It is good to see this much attention being given to activity development and Spanish-language documentation, and to cexercise/>lose feedback loops with teachers who use the latest tools every week with their students.
So don’t wait — download a copy of Dextrose2 and try it out!
NB: If you’re looking for the latest Dextrose with the Gnome desktop option added back in, you can request this on the sugar-devel mailing list. It’s on the list of versions to make, but not a high priority at the moment.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
