OLPC Chiapas

This is a small deployment of about 40 laptops to three one-room multigrade rural schools in the forests of Chiapas, Mexico. The project Tecno-Tzotzil won one of the awards of HASTAC's & MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. It is implemented by the Graduate School of Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, México

We are using the Strawberry edition of Sugar (yummm...) on a Stick running on Classmate Convertible netbooks, as we were unable to obtain just 40 XOs. The Classmate is a nice machine, faster than the XO, and also comes with camera, collapsible display, mesh network capability and is equally resistant to very active kids. It has an integrated SD Card reader, so we are actually using Sugar on SD card. SoaS currently does not support laptop to laptop communication in the wild - they have to be connected either to the same wireless net or else to the school server or other jabber server in order to share activities. We haver a local jabber server on each classroom. SoaS is still in Beta but fairly stable and well supported by the Sugar Labs community.

Classes started August 24, 2009, after intensive training of the instructors and educational authorities. We have provided some constructionist lesson plans, but intend to motivate the instructors to develop their own plans. We will research the impact of the laptops and software on children's learning of their standard science and math curriculum and their developing cognitive abilities not specified in the curriculum. This experiment will last one school year, but we will return one year afterwards to further assess the impact.

More details and blog on this project at http://sites.google.com/site/tecnotzotzil/

--Jose Icaza

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Primary Language	,|x|Language spoken::x}}
Number of Laptops	Number of manufactured laptops::40
Keyboard Layout	Keyboard::
Build	,|x|Software release::x}}
Date(s) Arrived in Country	,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}}
School Server	,|x|School server status::x}}
Pilot Status	Pilot status::Current status: Laptops are already being used at the three schools.