OLPC Chicago

About

The Chicago Interest Group is a way for people in the Chicagoland area to talk about and work together on OLPC. We aren't necessarily interested just in trying to bring OLPC into classrooms in Illinois; we're also interested in volunteering/contributing to the project.

OLPC Chicago IS

1. a nucleation point for exchange between local groups, towards the OLPC Boston office and back, and with other groups worldwide
2. helping in organizing XOs for the local groups
3. supporting and cherishing the autonomy of local groups
4. focusing on rough consensus, grassroots involvement, and working projects

OLPC Chicago IS NOT

1. going to do a local pilot in your school (although we'll encourage and support you if you want to do one yourself)
2. going to tell you what you are and aren't allowed to do (although we're always up for idea-bouncing and brainstorms)

(Thanks to OLPC Europe, from which the above lists are adapted.)

Contact and chapters

Mailing list

We have most of our Chicago-wide, intra-chapter discussions on the mailing list. If you are interested, please subscribe.

Flickr Group

OLPC Chicago has a OLPC_Chicago Flickr group for photos of meetups, pictures of modifications to our XOs, etc. Please join!

IMSA chapter

IMSA is a public high school in Aurora.

MVCC chapter

MVCC is a junior college in Palos Hills.

Future Activities

• Feb 16 2008 - There will be an informal meetup at Moraine Valley Community College Saturday, February 16 at 11:00 a.m. The meeting will be held in T921B in the Center for Contemporary Technology (T Building) at MVCC in southwest suburban Palos Hills, IL. Everyone is welcome to drop by to mesh with us!

- Directions to the MVCC campus can be found at http://www.morainevalley.edu/gen_info/directions.htm

- Campus Map: http://www.morainevalley.edu/gen_info/pdf_maps/construction-color.pdf

- Classroom T921B is in the T Building: http://www.morainevalley.edu/gen_info/pdf_maps/CCT.pdf

If you have any questions, feel free to email Larry Langellier at langellier at morainevalley dot edu.

Past activities

• Feb 5 2008 - Meetup at Marie Murphy School. Karen's blog writeup and Joe's blog post
• /Jan 26 2008 - There was a meetup at MVCC to introduce the project, play with laptops, and come up with ideas for things the MVCC chapter could work on. Highlights included TamTam demos by an 8-year-old and Record demos by a 10-year-old, as well as a kid-run laptop disassembly session.
• /Jan 22 2008- The first COGG (Chicago-OLPC Grassroots Group) meeting was Jan 22, 2008 at Google Chicago. IMSA students and others presented their projects, connections were made, and small interest groups were formed. For more information, including notes and blogs from the meeting, click here.
• /Jun 02 2007 - Hackathon at SkinnyCorp.

Project ideas

• We're thinking about working on Choose Your Own Adventure.
• TinyLanguage is a comprehension-based language learning tool.

Resources for OLPC_Chicago

• OLPC_Chicago Resources - Karen Smith's note of 2/14/08 with a summary of online resources for OLPC Chicago and other tips and tricks, collected from available resources. Please add to this list!