Grassroots bootcamp/Prerequisites

As part of your application, you'll need to complete the following tasks and provide us with links to your creations in your application. Work you have already done can count towards this. If you can think of a different way to demonstrate similar skills, you can ask for an alternative to be approved.

If you don't have a background in one or more of these areas, never fear - there are study groups forming to collaborate towards learning these things. It should be possible for someone with no XO/programming background, no wiki background, and/or no educational theory background to get up to speed within two weeks of intense part-time work.

Feel free to add resources for completing each prerequisite within its section, below.

Bundle creation

Knowledge demonstrated: programming, bundle creation, Activity-making, mediawiki usage

Create and release an .xo Activity or an .xol Collection with a wikipage - with screenshots - documenting its installation and usage.

Translation

Knowledge demonstrated: i18n considerations, pootle

Translate at least 40 terms in pootle. If you don't know a foreign language, find a friend who does and sit down with them; they provide the translations, you put them in.

Testing

Knowledge demonstrated: testing, bug reporting, Trac

Find at least 2 bugs in any software or hardware that ships by default, create Trac tickets for them, and cc yourself on the tickets.

Community support

Knowledge demonstrated: repair, community support, RT, IRC

Resolve 10 technical or community RT tickets (deletions of spam don't count). List the ticket numbers resolved and your username. If you don't have RT access, apply to the Support gang program or provide us with transcripts of 10 email or IRC exchanges demonstrating you helping other people fix their XO-related or community-related problems.

Educational theory

Knowledge demonstrated: proposal-writing and project-planning, teaching, Constructionism, open-source philosophy

Write a draft of one of the following:

• a proposal (200-800 words) describing activities you might engage in to illustrate a set of history materials (or any other subject of your choice). your intended audience is children and educators.
• a pilot proposal (400-800 words) describing how you would set up a learning initiative for a local class or school of 20 or more children. Your intended audience is educators and parents - people who may not have a lot of technical or open-source background, but whose overriding questions are "how will this help students learn?" and "how is it possible for this to happen?" Have a specific school/deployment-site in mind, or describe how you will find one and what selection criteria will be used.
• Create your own exercise (see directions on this, above).

Regardless of what exercise you choose to pursue for this section, post both your work and a peer review of it (hint: one good way to get someone else to review your proposal is to offer to review theirs in exchange). Refer to (and cite) sources from educational theory and other fields. At least two of your sources should be published books or papers on education (suggestion: Papert and Piaget are good places to start). During the bootcamp we will have time where those interested can refine pilot and learning proposals and move them towards implementation.