OLPC New Zealand

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There are several communities in NZ and the Pacific working on OLPC related projects and initiatives.

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  • Wellington testers and promoters - they have met weekly since mid 2008 (see WellyNZTesters)
  • Auckland testers and promoters meet weekly
  • Welcome to Christchurch - our newest community
  • Computer Clubhouse Manukau City NZ
  • Translations
  • Ian Thomson is the Oceania Project Coordinator

Watch the NZ video made by Spring TV Join our Facebook group

Come join us

To hear about our events, subscribe: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-nz

Look at laptop.org.nz for current events in New Zealand.

Main contacts:

  1. Tabitha, Youtube Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsgZq23FlAg
  2. Brenda,
  3. Tim,
  4. Alastair

NZ XO Inventory

Test Requests

Wellington community

The Wellington Testers meet every Saturday mid-morning at Southern Cross cafe to drink coffee and test-drive the latest version of the software for the XO.

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We keep notes of the things we try, of the things that work well, and of the bugs we find. We post the notes to the development list, including all the things that did work (this makes programmers happy, after all, most of them are volunteers). For the bugs, we try our best to find steps to reproduce, and diagnose them.

To join in the testing action, you can find us in New Zealand's capital, Wellington, testing at Southern Cross, 35 Abel Smith Street on Saturdays from 10.30am/11.00am until our fingers don't work anymore. Check out the Cross

Who are we? Curious kids of various ages - some of us are involved in education, others in technology.

Auckland community

Meeting every Saturday at 11:00 am at the Windsor Castle 144 Parnell Road. The Windsor website Considering other venue options for other days as the testing community grows. This community is carrying out tests on multiple builds for XO-1.0s and XO-1.5s as well as looking at educational use and sugar translations. Contact tabitha@tabitha.net.nz for more information.


Suz & Tamara Olliver are OLPC owners who like to meet up to review progress, show off what they are doing, generally socialise and eat. Their domain is olliver.family.gen.nz and email addresses are of the form <firstname>@<domain>. Please feel free to email them.

Vik has been working on a one reprap per child project and is now an established supplier of viewfinders for XOs. He prints them on the RepRap using an XO to drive the printer. Watch the Video to see for yourself

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Computer Clubhouse Manukau City NZ

Is looking at deploying a 1-1 Learning Programme in Otara Manukau City

Christchurch community

Greg Baker is starting a Christchurch community. Ask on olpc-nz@lists.laptop.org for further information.

Moodle Developers

A team of Moodle developers led by Martin Langhoff @ Catalyst worked on several aspects of the OLPC project.

At the moment, I am working on an OpenID implementation for Moodle, and doing some work on the School Server (XS). Others, more hardware tinkerers, have been playing with the ATest1 and B2 machines and debugging OS problems. At the moment there is a custom Moodle branch for OLPC in my development tree, and that is where my work is concentrated. (Martin Langhoff)

What else is going on?

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Tabitha ran the education miniconf at the LCA2010 conference mid January 2010 and we had a "hacking the sugar layout" session

We are working on translations to Maori, Samoan and Tongan in Pootle. A few other languages are being assisted here in NZ so anyone bilingual please feel free to join us if you would like to contribute.

We have volunteers visiting deployments: Tabitha and Tom went to Samoa in August to visit two schools; they setup the school server and access points; one of the volunteers is about to go to Rwanda so watch this space for more details.

We're testing the deployment activities on multiple builds on XO-1.0s and XO-1.5s, as well as testing Sugar on a Stick on other hardware.

We have some Auckland University students working with us on a project for sending data via radio. They are using an XO-1.0 and XO-1.5 and looking at doing tests in the field, maybe Solomon Islands. Team OneBeep came third in the international Microsoft Imagine Cup for their solution.


Log of things done and cool stuff we want to talk about

We keep a log of what we do every week. To view this log go to the WellyNZTesters page Also check out the laptop.org.nz site for our stories.

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See us in action

Come to a community gathering. Check laptop.org.nz or email olpc-nz@lists.laptop.org to make contact.

Peer-reviewed educational content to implement in your pilot classes

Come and explore:

Please try A cool new type of interactive online schoolbook.

We love to learn:

Einstein.School 2.0 The interactive schoolbook that you can edit, update and improve. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.

This peer-reviewed [1] [2] educational content is written under an open content licence and gives everyone the freedom to use or modify the material to suit his or her own needs.


Testing | Volunteer | User:Tabitha |