CofC OLPC

Goals

The goal of this project is to get undergraduate students at the College of Charleston to make direct contributions to the OLPC project.

We're planning to begin by learning the environment, finding specific projects to which we'd be able to contribute and submitting bug reports during the Fall semester (through December 2008).  We also may travel to parts of South Carolina where teachers are actively using the machines in the classroom.  This may spark ideas for projects that we can assist with.

In the Spring and Summer (beginning January 2008), the goal is to have a student working closely with a faculty member on software development for the xo as a (possibly funded) independent research project.

In addition to the contributions we plan to make, we also plan to use them as part of our high-school recruiting project.  The goal of this project is to get high school students in South Carolina interested in Computer Science by illustrating open-source projects.  We are in the process of setting up visits with SC high schools throughout the Fall and Spring semesters.

The outcome of this project will, at minimum, be experience working on a large-scale open-source project.  It is our hope, however, that we can make a significant contribution to the project during this time period.

Donating the laptops to us for our work would be very helpful in getting a small college grant to help fund the student for the Spring semester.  This is because it will demonstrate some outside support for the project.

In my experience a student who is getting paid for a project will work significantly harder with far better results than a student working for a grade.

Additionally, my goal is to eventually integrate OLPC projects into the CS classroom at CofC, perhaps as a senior level Software Engineering project.  This is a first step towards that goal.

Software

I've been using GNU/Linux and open-source software since 1999.  I have experience coding in Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, etc.

The student will have experience in Python and Java (we teach Python as a first language at CofC).

Hardware

As the Director of Free IT Athens, I was responsible for initiating and running the Computer Recycling program, where we refurbished and re-used old computer hardware.  So I am familiar with testing and repairing computer hardware.

That being said, I don't have much experience in the "hardware engineering" side of Computer Science, but I'm willing to learn if necessary.

The student will likely be a junior-senior level undergraduate with experience programming in Python and Java, along with general CS knowledge.  I don't expect that the student will have worked on any large scale software projects.