One Laptop per Child

Sameer Verma of OLPC-SF, as he mentiond at last week’s amazing community summit, is putting together a book server for use in rural India, with 20,000 books and audio files on it for students and teachers to use locally. He is going to deploy it at a school pilot near his familial hometown.

This is a Pathagar server implementing the OPDS bookserver standard, running on a tiny Sheeva Plug device, accessible over a local network to XOs in the neighborhood.  The Sheeva Plug is low power and has USB and SD ports that make it easy to expand such an offline library.  Here it is plugged in and in use, drawing a total of 4 Watts:

Sayamindu Dasgupta, who contributed to the design of the OPDS specification, developed the Pathagar server to implement the spec; Manuel Quiñones created the version of the server used here.  Book and audio suggestions are welcome for this particular build, and a web-based form for linking to OPDS archives suitable for inclusion in the image will be up shortly.  If you have your own Sheeva Plug, you can torrent the original disk image of this installation.

The setup was load-tested last night, using a simple build: a stock Sheeva Plug and 16GB USB key (total cost: $100). Quick statistics:

• Power draw: 4W
• Simultaneous downolads: 500
• Library size: 10,000 – 50,000 books

For details, images, and a mailing list for discussion, see the bookserver project page.

Nick writes about his first time as a Maker at Maker Faire, where he showed off some lovely hacks involving XOs and hung out with the Raspberry Pi team, among others. More photos and background on his blog.

The contest rules are out for the OLPC/Nickelodeon storytelling contest.   OLPC and Nick will be judging the submissions together.  All XO users in Latin America are eligible to compete by submitting a story, anination, or other multimedia clip of up to 3 minutes.  Contest ends August 29.

OLPC Association y Nickelodeon organizan y juzgan el concurso en conjunto (anuncio, reglas completas):

Hat tip to Claudia, Christoph, and Giulia.

A team sponsored by Uruguay’s Universidad de la Republica has developed a simple electronics kit that can be used to modify an XO-1 to let you draw on its screen with a wireless stylus and a thin acrylic sheet, turning it into a touchscreen.  Christoph has written more about this and their related robotics work.

The methodology described in their project poster is brief and tantalizing – it looks like a most promising idea. The invention can in theory work with any screen or computer, but here they are showing how it works with an XO. Here is a cexercise/>loseup of a Lapix set in action:

Lapix in action

Check out the photo and transcription of the project poster after the jump.
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Team BUTIÁ from Uruguay has been working on an XO robotics project for over a year. They showed off their line-following XO-robot, butiabot, in Montevideo this weekend. An XO running TurtleArt code hooked up to a mobile robotic platform followed a dark line along the ground.

They have posted some details of their prototypes online.
This reminds me of the XO hack to control a Roomba over the Net, but cooler, with Turtle Art and a realtime-hackable control program.

Earlier this week, the municipality of Bluefields in Northeast Nicaragua received 7,500 XOs from the Fundación Zamora Terán. These were distributed to all primary teachers and children in the rural community, which is a mix of Miskito, Mestizo, Rama, Garifona, and Creole families.

Roberto and MaryJo Zamora, the husband and wife owners of LAFISE-BanCentro bank, founded the Zamora-Teran Foundation last year to train teachers and students involved in the OLPC projects in the country, and to distribute and manage the logistics and telecommunication infrastructure of the project. This is an extraordinary example of a private sector, non-profit entity helping to motivate their country by example, in launching a project like this — and we are lucky to be working with such a skilled and dedicated regional partner.

Students at the handout ceremony

This marks the first regional saturation in the country, in an already remarkable community — they already have a thriving Bluefields forum online covering everything from art to civic development. Nicaragua may well become the next educational success story in Latin America.

In early May, Save the Children‘s State of the World’s Mothers 2010 report ranked Afghanistan last among the 160 countries surveyed, in terms of how easy it was to raise children.

While medical care is often limited, and being an infant in Afghanistan poses many risks, it is also a tough place to grow up. Only 52% of primary aged school children are enrolled in school, where classes are often made up of more than fifty students. Despite the extraordinary restoration of public schools and teachers over the past decade, there is still a lack of teachers and school buildings, and children receive an average of 2.5 hours of school a day. That is half of what children in developed nations (OECD) receive.

These numbers reflect a vast improvement from when the Taliban controlled the country – over the past three years, school enrollment has grown from 800,000 students to 4.5 million. But youthful curiosity is not bounded by time spent in school.  We are working to make sure that, district by district, these children have tools and projects to explore and to experiment with, so they can have time to learn even when school does not have time for them.

A class of Afghan girls at work on their XOs. Photographed by Elissa Bogos

Note: Some information comes from the latest OLPC Afghanistan Briefing Note.

Christoph Derndorfer, widely known for his ministry to young XO pilots, fashion sense, and active speaking / writing /editing about OLPC, has recently kicked off a Latin American Tour.  (Todd Kelsey, where are your tour-badge-printing skills when we need them?)  He plans to visit all of our country partners in the region with significant deployments this summer, documenting his experience.

Christoph’s travel reports are enchanting.  Take for instance the recent photoessay from Montevideo’s  eXpO photo exhibit in Uruguay – composed entirely of photos taken with XOs by students in 4 primary schools.  And with his iconic beard, long hair, and thousand-meter stare (seen below by the pool at the Fame Factory), Christoph is becoming as known for his xoly presence as for his love of good design and Sugarized icons.

ChristophD preaching the End Times (or at least the Shutdown Screen Icons)

To stalk with him across the southern slopes, deployment by deployment, you can follow his online writings, photos, and twext.  He is looking for personal contacts along the way, especially people who have played a role in OLPC deployments, so please get in touch with him if you know someone he should meet.

For Afghan kids who receive XOs, their educational time is split between self-study with the laptop at home and sharing their learning experience with teachers and fellow students in the classroom. This blended learning model gives kids sufficient learning time and the support to achieve curriculum.

OLPC Afghanistan laptops are installed with an assortment of materials, including the Ministry of Education’s standard national curriculum of books, health information, and complete localization of all core activities in Dari and Pashto.

And the laptops aren’t just for students. By providing information for parents about economic opportunities, they give parents and kids the chance to learn together.

Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan.

In their recent publication “Briefing Note – One Laptop Per Child in Afghanistan,” authors Lima Ahmad (AIMS), Kenneth Adams (AIMS), Mike Dawson (PAIWASTOON), and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA) make one thing very clear: Afghanistan requires an innovative approach to improve their education system.

“The conventional remedy of building more schools, training more teachers and providing more materials would require a six fold increase to the education budget (in the order of $1.8Bn USD per year) and would take 10-15 years to yield measurable results,” the report reads. “While a steady increase in teacher capacity and educational infrastructure is expected over time, Afghanistan does not have the luxury of waiting 15 years to produce the work force foundations for sustainable economic growth.”

Photographed by Jacob Simkin

Instead, the authors say, a more cost-effective, accelerated method lies in using OLPC’s blended learning model, which incorporates technology with teaching. If executed, in 12-18 months OLPC can more than double Afghan students’ time to learning, provide feedback on curriculum materials, and provide resources that the students wouldn’t otherwise have.

By adopting this model, OLPC can “finally give children in both mainstream and community settings sufficient learning time and support to achieve curriculum outcomes.”

Make sure to check out the rest of the report here.

Rwanda aims to complete deployment of their next 100,000 children by next summer. National project coordinator Nkubito Bakuramutsa was interviewed this week for an article in the Irish Times.

They discuss recent successes and policies at the Rwandan schools that have deployed the first batch of XOs in the country. Kagame and the teachers involved are both optimistic that they will transform their society into a leader in technology advances. Kagame aims to triple the nation’s economic output over the next 10 years.

Vik Olliver developed the RepRap 3D printer, an early draft of the holy grail of 3D printing: a printer that can replicate itself. Since then, RepRaps have taken hold of people’s imaginations and workshops around the world. Vik currently runs his own out of his basement, driven by Linux software running off of an XO.

To add another layer of awesome, Vik has been turning out gen-3 viewfinders for the XO. Cruder than gen-2, perhaps, but 10x cheaper.  For those of you who don’t regularly use your XO as a camera, here is the evolution of the XOview viewfinder:

• from Mike Lee’s lego construct (modeled here by a fine shock of curly hair)
• to a beautifully precise 3D-printed model by Phil Carizzi, the next month (modelled here by an enthusiastic Cici)
• to this simpler and lower-cost reprapped version, first noticed by us in the taniwha’s hands last fall.

But I just today saw my first of these third-generaiton XOviews, when Mike passed out a stack for our Cambridge office. (Thanks!)

As to how an XO is driving this machine making XO parts, OLPC NZ posted a lovely ‘how do they do that?’ video last fall as well. I’ve watched the video a couple of times, and I still want to see it in person. Are any local reprap owners willing to give a live demo?

Also in Arabic: في اللغة العربية

After a 10-month wait for approvals, the UNRWA OLPC core team, administrators, parents and children of Rafah took part in a brilliant beginning to the UNRWA OLPC program in Gaza, with a celebration event on April 29th. I was fortunate to spend the days beforehand with this team and their community. They worked tirelessly – children, parents, teachers, developers, and administrators – and it was inspiring to work with them.

The Palestinian people have the optimism, resourcefulness, and dedication to turn a speck of dust into a garden. Not just any garden, but one that the entire community shares.

And the XO has a special feature beyond its tech specs and activities – it can energize a community to have hope for their children.  One member of the core team, Jamil, remarked;  “This is XO is a humble machine, we can take it and do great things with it.”

They did.

In a mere 12 weeks after their first intro to the XO, the Gaza core and community team:
- prepared infrastructure
- designed and gave workshops for 200 teachers and 12 administrators
- introduced the XO to 2000+ students
- helped these children introduce the XO to their parents
- created a digital library
- ported their own ILP learning games to run on the XO
- integrated Memorize, Chat, Browse, & Speak into classroom activities
- helped teachers begin distributing homework via the XO
- witnessed initially skeptical parents begin to advocate at shops and mosques for XOs for all the children of Gaza

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Haiti has been devastated by the recent earthquake.  Official estimates are that 110,000 people died and in the Port-au-Prince area, 75% of schools were destroyed.  We are exploring what we can to support the children and schools we have been working with there.  People on the ground in Haiti urgently need sanitation, water, food, and shelter.

Please consider donating to one of these aid groups working on essential services on the ground:

* UNICEF
* World Food Program
* Partners In Health

We are doing what we can for the 60 schools that we have been working with in Haiti – primarily planning for the spring after the first phase of rebuilding is underway.  We will be sending a group of OLPCorps volunteers to Haiti later this year, and are organizing a used XO drive to recover XOs that can be refurbished and sent to Haiti.   Luckily, our Haitian team (technical and in the government) was not hurt in the earthquake, and they are planning to help displaced students get back to school as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, around the US, people (including our own Adam Holt and Tim Falconer) have been gathering in CrisisCamps to brainstorm ways to better use collaborative technology to help groups on the ground.  If you are technically-minded, there is a real demand for programmers and interface designers to help some of these projects thrive.

Update: thanks for all of the feedback on the design!  There has been some discussion about materials, and a few interesting pieces have passed around the office, but no new eye-candy is forthcoming for a while — we’re busy getting the 1.5 out the door.

The XO-3: it’s designed to be thin, sleek, and touch, while continuing to lower power, cost, and material waste.  We’ve been anticipating the new designs for a while, and now they’ve arrived!  As announced in Tuesday’s  press release, after our upcoming releases of our 1.5 and 1.75 models next year, we are looking at the XO-3, a thin touchscreen tablet, for 2012.  Here are the latest images from the Fuse design team:

Today we announced our coming hardware lineup, the pending production of the XO 1.5, and published the first concept photos and timeline for the XO-3 tablet.  Here’s the press release:

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD DRIVES BREAKTHROUGH ADVANCES IN REVOLUTIONARY XO CHILDREN’S LAPTOP Product Road Map to Deliver Unprecedented High Performance, Low Power Consumption and Design Innovation at Lower and Lower Cost

Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2009 – One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, announced today its product road map to deliver robust laptop performance and innovative design for use in the most remote, poor and rural communities and at the lowest power and cost in the industry.

“The first version of OLPC’s child-centric laptop, the XO, is a revolution in low-cost, low-power computing. The XO has been distributed to more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries and in 25 languages,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “To fulfill our mission of reaching 500 million children in all remote corners of the planet, OLPC will continue to innovate in design and performance. Because we are a non-profit, we hope that industry will copy us.”

The new versions of the XO laptop will be as follows:

• XO 1.5 – The XO 1.5 is the same industrial design as the XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor (replacing AMD), it will provide 2x the speed, 4x DRAM memory and 4x FLASH memory. It will run both the Linux and Windows operating systems. XO 1.5 will be available in January 2010 at about $200 per unit. The actual price floats in accordance with spot markets, particularly for those of DRAM and FLASH.

• XO 1.75 – The XO 1.75, to be available in early 2011, will be essentially the same industrial design but rubber-bumpered on the outside and in the inside will be an 8.9”, touch-sensitive display. The XO 1.75 will be based on an ARM processor from Marvell that will enable 2x speed at 1/4 the power and is targeted at $150 or less. This ARM-based system will complement the x86-based XO 1.75, which will remain in production, giving deployments a choice of processor platform.”

• XO 3.0 – The XO 3.0 is a totally different approach, to be available in 2012 and at a target price well below $100. It will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it. The XO 3.0 will leapfrog the previously announced (May 2008) XO 2.0, a two-page approach that will not be continued. The inner workings of 3.0 will come from the more modest 1.75.

Let us know what you think!

The School Server is a key component of OLPC deployments — and one that was somewhat late to the stage. So I am pleased to report that there is a new and improved! version 0.6 available.

The main goal of this release is making installation and configuration easier and more reliable. It is an incremental update on the XS-0.5.x codebase, light on new features but strong on the “it just works” side. And very easy to upgrade for XS-0.5.x users.

What is a School Server, you ask? When you deploy XOs to a school, you want a server to connect them to the internet, serve content locally, provide backup  and upgrade services, and more. You can find out more in  our earlier story on it, or jump straight into the wikipage that explains it all.

This release brings:

• Easier installation. Mysterious ejabberd commands are gone, rejoice!
• Moodle and the XO authenticate transparently. Register, restart, click the ‘Local Schoolserver’ link in Browse. It just works.
• Better network scalability. Moodle can directly control the neighbourhood view which is controlled by ejabberd. Now traffic no longer swamps the network and XOs.
• Delegated security. You can use time-based security even with disconnected or partially connected School Servers.
• An XO can run as a School Server. Suitable for small schools or groups.  This is still experimental, but is running pretty well.
• Want to know more?  Read the release notes.

The work for our next release has already started, as people have been working ahead.  More after the jump.

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