User:Ndoiron/Kasiisi

The Kasiisi Project has supported a school in rural Uganda since 1997. OLPC Kasiisi was a 2009 [Deployment] of 100 XO laptops, which has recently received an additional 55 laptops. This school in Uganda has a focus on environmental education, and students learn from the ongoing conservation work at Kibale National Park. Pen pal connections have been made to a school in Massachusetts.

My proposal for the Kasiisi school and larger community is a mapping and environmental sensing project to take place this summer (2010). Regular sensor readings will continue for a year.

Environmental Sensing Class

• Teach all students how to use temperature, pH, and light sensors with the laptops' Measure activity.

• Use the pH sensor to compare stream water with rain water collected by the school. Ask students to test their drinking water at home.

• Demonstrate the light sensor's function and produce graphs. Ask students to predict the sensor's readings over 24 hours, and test this. Ask students to predict additional graphs (for example, "a cloudy day", "a solar eclipse").

• Divide students into groups. Use aluminum foil or other reflective materials to design solar energy collectors. The winning group is the one which collects the most sunshine over the course of the school day (measured by a photosensor in each collector).

• Build a flowmeter for a local stream, combining a float sensor (depth) and rotation sensor (velocity). I am a civil engineering student and am familiar with these sensors. I will use measurements to make a cross-section of the stream and local knowledge of the stream's crest in the rainy season to ensure readings can be made throughout the year.

• Once sensors are in place, have students use a GPS unit and my OfflineMap activity to geolocate each sensor.

• Store sensor data on the school server and update the sensors' feeds on Pachube daily.

Summer Mapping Class

• Modify my OfflineMap activity to use the best existing maps of Kibale National Park, Kampala (the capital), and Fort Portal (a city 5 miles away, with high-resolution imagery on Google Maps).

• Teach students how to read maps and use a GPS unit, starting with an area they are familiar with (Fort Portal).

• Have students take photos and place them on the map, with the help of a GPS.

• Create a class for more advanced mapping of points of interest and roads in Kasiisi. Such a map of their community does not currently exist - even Fort Portal (with a population of tens of thousands) has only a few accurately-mapped roads on Google Maps.

• Store all mapped information on the school server. Classes and penpals can access and add to this digital maps library, and the maps can be put into KML format for upload to Project Kasiisi's website, Google Mapmaker, and OpenStreetMap.

Prior Experience

I am a civil engineering student with extensive experience with mapping/GIS, including the Map and OfflineMap activities for the OLPC laptop. General programming experience for the web and scientific data include use of Google App Engine, adding HTML5 charts to the SocialCalc spreadsheet activity, and running Perl programs to test video encoding and decoding.

I have taken courses in electrical engineering. Of particular interest is the "Making Things Interactive" course, which dealt with creating sensors and useful devices with an Arduino microcontroller. I used a variety of sensors and an RFID reader with the Arduino, and got the Arduino development software to run on the XO laptop.