Contributing content

The One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) is looking for quality educational content and software to include in its distribution to spread around the world to children using XO laptops. Some of these materials will be installed on every laptop, some will be available at every school on school servers, and others will be available online.

How to get involved

To offer specific content, learning tools, and ideas to the One Laptop per Child project, please do any of the following:

• join one our library or devel mailing lists,
• submit a software project application or a grassroots learning initiative proposal
• Add ideas directly to the educational content ideas, sotware ideas, or hardware ideas pages
• email content@laptop.org or software@laptop.org.

If you are a developer or creator who expects to need to test things directly on an XO, you can run an emulator on your own computer or apply to our developers program.

A call for content ideas

OLPC is extending a call for content creators, publishers, and archivists to suggest educational material for inclusion in our digital library network. We are particularly interested in materials that are produced specially for children and teachers; designed for ease of localizaiton, customization, and other reuse; available in many languages; and available under a free content license. Materials can include:

• Texts – stories and poems; textbooks, workbooks, how-tos and lab manuals;
• Reference works – encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps and atlases;
• Images – symbols and fonts, blueprints, sketches, photographs and art;
• Multimedia content – animations, audio books, songs and audio recordings, videos;
• Software – games, tools, scripts, simulations, self-assessments and interactive tools

All material installed on the laptops will be available under a free license, such as the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution/Share-alike licenses (The Creative Commons No-derivatives and Non-commercial licenses are too restrictive and should not be used). Materials under other Free licenses may be included in school and regional libraries.

File formats

Content submitted should be available in file formats that support the OLPC goals. In particular, they must be unencumbered formats (not requiring patent licensing or other restrictions), and they must take relatively little space (so compressed formats are valuable). Document formats like HTML, PDF, DJVU and OpenDocument should be encouraged. In particular, DJVU allows existing paper books to be scanned into an efficient storage format so they can be used as e-books.

See Choosing image formats for more about image formats, such as PNG and SVG. Ogg is valuable for audio.

More about OLPC

For more information about the project, see the overview of OLPC and list of current events on this site. There is also a static website with background information at www.laptop.org.

Examples

School books become mini-websites

Once publishers/authors share their normally printed materials (so that electronic versions can be formed), kids will be able to -at the teacher's instruction- turn to page-x simply by clicking on the shortcut icon (or bookmarked web page) of the "eBook" in question and instantly go to page-x; and will be able to associate ther assignments directly with a page in the book. This will require D-BUS support to be added to Evince.

About content development

Content Developers are people whose primary concern is to create digital content for children to learn from. This could be as simple as scanning existing books into DJVU format to be used with the Evince ebook reader. Or it could involve translating curriculum material into a target language. Or, it may involve authoring original material to fit into the context of the OLPC and regions where it will be deployed.

This section exists to collect resources for these non-technical developers. Please add to it if you can.