OLPC Rochester, NY

a local grassroots group

About

The Rochester, NY interest group is a way for people in the Rochester, New York has_location_country::USA area and surrounding locations to talk about and work together on OLPC projects or activities. This is a page for those interested in volunteering or contributing to the project.

We use a Google Groups group OLPC Rochester, NY to manage member communications. You may subscribe there to receive group announcements.

We also have a discussion thread OLPC Rochester, NY at forum.laptop.org.

To receive updates to this page, log in / create an OLPC wiki user account (at the top rightmost link of any wiki page), then use the 'my preferences' link on your account to enter a private email address and select the option to receive email whenever a page you're watching is changed. Finally, click the watch tab at the top of this page to include it in your watchlist.

OLPC Rochester, NY is

• just beginning to organize.
• open to all interested parties in the Rochester or western New York area.

Event calendar

OLPC XO user's group meetings at the Rochester Institute of Technology - (See the Flyer.pdf.)

The Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT is supporting the OLPC XO Laptop project by raising awareness locally and conducting research and development initiatives.

The Lab and RIT are hosting the user's group. All meetings will take place in B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Building 70, Golisano Auditorium, Rm 1400, (See RIT Building 70 Google Map, or campus maps at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/.)

7:00 pm - 8:50 pm, on the 4th Thursday of the month.

Please join us on the following dates:

• 26 March 2009 7:00 - 8:50 pm
• 23 April 2009 7:00 - 8:50 pm
• 28 May 2009 7:00 - 8:50 pm

Past events

• 26 February 2009 - Sonstein on disaster-recovery networks

1. RIT Professor Jeff Sonstein spoke on the potential use of the XO in disaster-recovery efforts.
   • He described his involvement with Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system that was conceived and developed in response to the 26 December 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami (Wikipedia history).
   • His team reports their work on the Center for the Handheld Web blog page.
   • Jeff described the ReSTful (Representational State Transfer) software architecture, and his plans to migrate Sahana to this architecture.
   • He then plans to port the software to the XO because of its ability to self organize a network. This will be extremely valuable in a disaster when the Internet is disrupted.

     After the meeting I learned that the OLPC Project will be sending 4 XOs to the Hastily-Formed Network Research Group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California for testing and trial integration into their disaster Fly Away Kits.

2. Fred Grose demonstrated the Etoys environment on the XO using a VirtualBox virtualization of the Sugar on a Stick distribution of XO software environment.
   • Sugar on a Stick or virtualization is a convenient way to project a running Sugar system on a conference room screen.
   • Fred suggests you explore Etoys by steping through the short tutorials available by clicking the '?' icon in the Etoys toolbar.
3. Bill Hickok gave a presentation on getting started with Python.
   • He reviewed the history of the language and some of its advantageous features.
4. Karlie Robinson handed out some Fedor Sugar Spin LiveCDs for PC and Macs.
   • These are the same image as used in the Sugar on a Stick distribution and can boot on a machine without installing to its disc.
5. The group agreed to support Professor Stephen Jacobs' Honors Seminar on Developing for the OLPC XO (see the Projects section).

• 22 January 2009 - Getting to know you and the OLPC XO 2009 kickoff

• 26 March 2008 - Show & Tell Workshop at RIT

Fall 2009 Seminar

• Professor Stephen Jacobs' course in collaborative innovation, Honors Seminar Developing for the One Laptop Per Child XO, a community, open source course including OLPC, XO, Sugar, & OLPC Has_location_city::Rochester, NY Has_location_country::USA. Starting: Tuesday Start_date::08 September 2009, 12:00 pm, running weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:00 - 14:00 EDT through End_date::19 November 2009. The weekly seminar meets in RIT Building 70, Room 2000.
• Seminar materials are at our Teaching Open Source wiki site.
• Seminar projects are at our Sugar Labs Math4 Project site.

Spring 2009 Seminar

• • Note to students, the List of games relevant to our goal.

• Seminar link-sharing hub: http://delicious.com/maths4olpc/

18 May 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot (Final session)

15 May 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

08 May 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

Online lecture by Tom Edwards, Founder & Chair at International Game Developers Association, on "Creating Games for Global Players: Understanding the Geocultural Dimension of Game Content", File:RIT Lecture TomEdw-08May09.ppt

01 May 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

24 April 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

17 April 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

10 April 2009 automatic summary, meeting log from the meeting robot

03 April 2009, seminar session notes

27 March 2009, seminar session notes

20 March 2009, seminar session notes

13 March 2009, seminar session notes

On 13 March 2009, Adjunct faculty member Eric M. Grace, instructed the first OLPC Development seminar. Introductions, Seminar outline, Online tools, and development goals were discussed to build the foundation of the course. Focus on collaboration, communication, and creativity was key in fostering an innovative and productive learning environment.

A Powerpoint presentation provided the framework of the seminar discussion and can be viewed/downloaded here. Media:OLPC_Seminar_3-13-09.ppt.zip

Usability testing

See the Usability testing class project page for the project description, work documents, and reports.

Other ideas

If you're in the Rochester area and want to work on a project with someone local, post ideas here.

• your idea...