User:Ndoiron

I am a volunteer for The Kasiisi Project in Uganda and the Digital Literacy Project in the Boston area. In the fall, I will be a senior at Carnegie Mellon, studying civil engineering.

Contact

Please edit the talk page or e-mail ndoiron _at_ cmu.edu

Experience in Uganda

Uganda was awesome! It was my first time teaching, and my first time programming in the field. Over the next several weeks, I will be working to use what I've learned to improve a few activities and develop lesson plans.

I taught an environmental sensing and maps class with The Kasiisi Project near Fort Portal, Uganda. The mission statement of the class became "Out of the Box" - because not only were we trying new ways of learning, we were using maps and sensors to connect our XOs with the world around us, outside the "box" of the laptop itself. You can find links to the activities, content, and hardware on the blog.

Technical Solutions from Kasiisi

These updates, written and tested at Kasiisi, can be applied to several activities worldwide.

• Bug fixes and keyboard interactions for Map and OfflineMap. Students had trouble with the mouse, and sharing maps in OfflineMap.

• Improved WikiBrowse with easier search, friendlier 404 page, WikiPack addon articles

• Redesign of Measure activity, more sensor wires, better documentation and lesson plans, sound feature.

• Improved SocialCalc with chart color selection, translatable chart UI, and full-screen HTML5 Canvas charts (as an offline deployment, the Google Chart frame was annoying)

• Gutenberg eBook + Librivox --> audiobook scripts

Content from Kasiisi

• Add-on WikiPacks of up-to-date articles and photos from Simple English Wikipedia, which work both in Browse and in the WikipediaEN activity.

• PhotoPacks from BigPicture blog - download an example

• BookPack with audiobook support

Current Work

• Making lesson plans for Digital Literacy Project in Cambridge, Boston, and Nicaragua. Helping to supply useful content and activities.

• Storing student reading history, book reports, and favorite sites on a teacher XO, using the mesh network to collect reports. Allow long-term analysis of how students rate books and digital content. While targeting original version to help students review and discover books at one school library, larger-scale deployments could use this to share and annotate the best digital content.

• citizen science projects for laptop schools in the US and abroad

• DNA Lab showing inherited traits through phenotype (cartoon lizards) and genotype (simulated DNA strand)

Prior Work for the XO

• Links to downloadable content

• Major update to Map (activity) including offline mapping for Haiti, Uganda, and other countries. Maps can be customized using MapPacks.

• Adding bar, pie, line, and scatter charts to SocialCalc application
  • Test (in Firefox or XO's Browse) here
  • Users' Guide

• Mapping applications, introducing students to GIS and mapping
  • Intro to Mapping Technology
  • Explored SVG maps for classes without internet access

• Created HippoMath with eToys
• Patch for the Geoquiz application

OLPCorps

Technical lead for an OLPCorps team - unfortunately our team was rejected, but we made it to finalists

See my team's OLPCorps proposal here: OLPCorps Carnegie Mellon/Teachers' College/Williams College Kenya