Contributors program/June 27, 2008

Time : 1400-1415 EST / 1800-1815 UTC

Agenda

• laptops out to date / this week
• local laptop pools (temporary, long term)
• major outstanding requests
  • Hilaire, from France : educational trial in a school w/development support (30)
  • Mesh testing, from Brasil : followup from existing collaborator (35)

Attending

• Sj
• ChristophD
• Mchua

outstanding requests

• Hilaire Fernandes : creator of DrGeo, long-time developer of learning materials.

Asking for 35 machines for a school/development trial.

Our team as the following experiences:
   - management in the educational system
   - design of learning contents and activities
   - teaching capabilities in primary and secondary education
   - development of software (C++, Python, Squeak)

Our objectives are to produce and develop both software and
interactive contents to be used in genuine situation with students in
primary schools (age 8 to 10). In the projects will be involved
inspectors of the educational system, pedagogical advisers, teachers,
managers and developers. 

About 15 persons will be involved at the core level of the project:
inspectors and managers of the educational system, pedagogical
advisers, teachers, developers.

Potentially, about 60 primary school teachers (+ teachers\' students) could be involved in the pilot area.

The developed contents will read as follow:

1. The iStoa.net learning platform with activities on
mathematics. Part of the iStoa.net sill needs to be completed and
tested. Experiments in genuine situations will be conducted with XO
and learners. More info at http://www.istoa.net

2. Interactive science book based on Etoys activities. The science
book will be related to the teaching of experimental sciences. Examples
of static documents we produced:

http://crdp.ac-bordeaux.fr:8080/cddp40/projets/sciences
http://crdp.ac-bordeaux.fr/ac/cassiopee


3.Interactive Etoys contents for outdoor learning activities in the
city. Example of related static documents we produced is:
http://crdp.ac-bordeaux.fr/cddp40/Espaces/LireLaVille/index.asp 

With the XO, the aim being to demonstrate how the machine can be used
as a contents provider while visiting hot topic in a town and also as
a means for the learner to produce contents within the Etoys
activities.

All the achieved contents will be available on-line and will be
experimented with the learners in the ecosystem.

Our expected outcome is:

  - a learning platform (see iStoa.net)
  - design of interactive contents
  - publications in scientific conferences and journal on the
    resulting achievements of the experimentation
  - more awareness about the OLPC project in the French educational
    system

• Luiz Schara, 50% complete.

looking for 30 machiens to test a dense mesh.

I'm a Professor at UFF (www.midiacom.uff.br/~schara), with a PhD in CS from UIUC

Our B2 laptops are no longer supported. We would like to get new laptops to continue our work. The work we have done is described in the link above.

We have tested the wireless mesh network capabilities of the XO, and helped with debugging the firmware. On phase 2 (which is beginning now) we will help describe the infrastructure needed in a school and the large scale infrastructure needed for deployment in Brazil