Olin university chapter

This is the wiki-homepage of the Olin college OLPC university chapter.

Office Hours

Weekly office hours are held at 1CC on Friday and Sunday afternoons. Use this space to update and organize transportation, as well as giving SJ a heads-up on how many people to expect.

4:30-6:30 pm, Friday, November 30

• drivers' names here (please include how many seats you have)
  • passengers get listed under driver
  • even if there are no drivers yet

2:00-5:00pm, Sunday, December 2

• Greg Marra - 4 seats
  • Ben Fisher
  • passengers here

Projects

Please post proposed projects here, so that we can apply for Developers program support (like XOs to use).

Project Name	Project Description	Professor	Contact	Materials needed	Additional Information
the title/name of your project	a basic description of your project	which Olin prof is supervising your project? (required)	your name here (link to user page, if you have a wiki account)	what do you need to do it?	anything else you want to say
Yalp	Audio sampling toy	n/a	Ben Fisher	nothing - done
Distributed mesh weather sensors (as an educational and research tool)	Create a USB weather data collection unit that can be inexpensively produced and provided to (students / schools).	Software Design / POE	Greg	Some money for prototyping, some people who like electronics, some people who want to develop the backend, some people who want to develop the XO mesh logging software.	Just an idea Andy Barry, myself, and Evan Morikawa came up with.
"Lights" game for OLPCs	Implement the "lights" game for the OLPC. [Online version of game].	Software Design	Greg	An OLPC and someone who knows a bit about PyGame type stuff.	It's a super fun addictive game.
"Unicoder" Character Pad	Simple text editor for quickly entering non-ascii characters.	Unknown	Ben Fisher	Completion, ideas, feedback, maybe someone who knows Sugar	I'm not sure whether this should be a dhtml-js or Python-gui. I have something that kinda works in Firefox.
MIDIpad	A program for creating electronic music.	Unknown	Ben Fisher	A bit more planning, implementation. I don't have enough time to do this alone.	Although many people associate MIDIs with cheap crappy audio, this is only only because modern computers tend to use low-quality instruments. Back in the day, there were actually good-sounding MIDI sound cards. Timidity can also render using SoundFonts, and there are some very good SoundFonts available online.
Mp3 tagger	Program for adding/changing ID3 tags for mp3/ogg audio files. The freeware program Mp3Tag is very good but its source is closed. Also, I'd like to add some ways to make metadata entry faster.	Unknown	Ben Fisher	Finishing it, help with the gui	Will the user need to organize files? What is the XO's filesystem?
USB GPS Device	Hardware GPS to connect to XO.	Unknown	Andy P	Software modification	This is another example of hardware that could produce value to international companies, creating income generation opportunities.
Development Image on ACL Machine	Install Sugar onto an ACL machine so we can play with it, and test things out faster than on the XOs	Mark Chang, hopefully	Stephen L	ACL Machine, Sugar image, Fedora	Should be useful

Meeting notes

Archives of minutes can be viewed at the Olin university chapter/archives page.

11/9/07

Lynne

• Lynne works with special ed kids
• Lynne is only deaf person at school, everyone else can hear
• Got them involved with robotix (2002)
• Do it after school
• Saw Olin's website
• Creative things with few materials
• So far lego robotics and math
  • want to move to not-lego robotics
• kids not quite making the grades for standardized tests
  • mcats (MA state preformance tests)
    • reading
    • writing
    • social science
    • science (lowest score in science))
• school is restructuring
• data analysis - look at mcat scores, see if doing well at math, etc
• students want project-based learning
• maybe do curriculum, with projects, focus on some data results (students scores)- ie bark-meter to see what dog is saying when barks
• interested in art, music, etc, try not to downsize
• K-5, ages 3-12
• VHP person came to school, gave school $10,000
  • mentors keep kids from giving up
  • especially girls give up
  • not enough people

want:

• come to look at school, see if it's what we want to do
• implement project-based learning

• tag with Engineering Discovery (Needham, Heena)
• Steve is working in Hyde Park (FIRST)
• Andy P remedial math programs
• Wellesley connection:
  • Andy P has connection
  • SWE may have connection
  • want to activate this

we should:

• meet with Engineering Discovery
  • maybe semester-long project to integrate
    • robotic puppets, keyboards, etc
    • Fred Martin at UMASS develped the "cricket" (robotic computer)
    • can create puppets and interactive art, carwash

Haruna

• from tech boston
• size people department
• try to support schools in advanced projects,
• second year involved in robotics
• city-wide involvement
• middle school kids do FIRST

VEX:

• aluminum/steel
• halfway between lego robots and FIRST

• november 19th good time to visit principal?
  • possibly in morning, at 10
  • have a lot of data of student progress that we could look at for inspiration
  • lots of % of students who don't understand this or that

• perfect solution:
  • students think of a project to build and create
  • brainstorming
  • how to get a car to levitate?
  • In the end, the kids say "I did this"
  • mentorship seems to be key component
  • sucessful, sucess often, sense of acomplishment, role model and content expertise
  • emphasize student-built curriculum, less teacher talking, more student talking
  • we can brainstorm projects for them, interesting ideas (solar cars?)
  • Greg had Invention Convention in middle school
• grant is for MCATS, follows them from 3rd grade to 5th grade, for science classes.

Current tasklist

• schedule visit to the Trotter School, coordinate with Engineering Discovery
• continue Yalp interface design
• schedule office hours
• brainstorming
• documentation