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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-03-29=
=Laptop News 2008-04-05=


1. Peru: Carla Monroy Gomez is in Lima, helping with the final preparations for the second round of teacher preparation in Peru. This coming week, 600 teachers in four regional centers will use the XO Laptop to explore, express, and collaborate. The next phase of the preparation will be in 18 regions as the XO is moving in waves into the furthest reaches of the country.
1. Peru: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Peru regarding this week's teacher preparation workshops. Teachers in four locations—Huancayo, Huampani, Chiclayo, and Arequipa—spent the week exploring the XO laptop—running the new software release, Build 703—and engaging in pedagogical discussions about technology and learning.


2. Mongolia: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin returned from Mongolia with news that a steering committee chaired by the MoE has been formed to oversee the deployment of the first 10000 laptops in Mongolia. Already, a campaign is underway to raise money for one laptop per child in all of Mongolia. The media coverage has been voluminous and the children at the two pilot schools have been thriving. The President of Mongolia remarked: "In the past, Mongolians explored the world by horseback. Today they will explore it with their laptops."
2. Update.1: Michael Stone, Chris Ball, and the rest of the tech team helped to prepare a new software release (Release Candidate 3) for Peru and Mexico this week. Update.1 will be tested in country and presumably be released at in the first week of April.


3. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Pakistan that the program at the Atlas School is going very well, with the children's excitement accelerating day by day. For the first two weeks, the children concentrated on music (Tam Tam) and video (Record). Presently, they are using the Write activity. They are fond of using the library to read story books in Farsi and to browse through maps. They also the multimedia activity (Watch & Listen), which they use to play music.The 5th graders have explored Etoys and are helping the younger children as well.
3. Security: Michael and Walter reviewed the Bitfrost specification, which is being implemented in phases. The current status (Update.1) is reflected in the wiki (See [[Bitfrost#Current Status]]).


4. Senegal: OLPC at IDLELO3: Fatimata Seye Sylla presented OLPC at the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) in Dakar Senegal. Under the theme "Making the knowledge economy work for Africa", this 3rd conference gathered hundreds of experts, decision makers, educators, and media experts from 20 different countries to exchange about the use of Free and Open source software for the development of Africa. OLPC had a booth manned by school children showing off their proficiency with Sugar.
4. Kavre, Nepal: The Nepalese Department of Education, Ministry of Education in coordination with OLPC Nepal has launched a pilot program of OLPC in Janajyoti School, Kavre. Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal stated the pilot as the first step of One Laptop Per Nepali Child movement. Director General of Department of Education marked the distribution day as a historical moment in Nepalese education history. Ankur, Iswor, Jitendra, Jwalanta, Manish, Nirmal, Prakash, Shankar, Shishir, Suyesh, Ujjwal, Sulav, Suraj, Suvash are working in the field among other OLPC Nepal volunteers. "Everyone is excited, the government officials, OLPC Nepal community, the school, parents and THE KIDS." (OLPC Nepal team has codenamed the pilot as "Sunrise". See [[Sunrise]] and http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com).


5. Nepal: Dev Mohanty has posted online how he and Mahabir Pun are using inexpensive wireless equipment to connect Bishwamitra and Bashuki pilot schools to the Internet and each other. The wireless network has an effective bandwidth of 8 Mbps between nodes (See [http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/223]).
Sulochan Acharya has built a prototype "E-Pustakalaya" (E-Library) for Nepal's deployments using the FedoraCommons Repository Software and the Fez front-end. FedoraCommons differs from typical content management systems in that it can scale to millions of objects. E-Pustakalaya will be publicly accessible within a few weeks and Sulochan will work to document his configuration.


The OLE Nepal team led four days of teacher training for 24 teachers, two community members, two school principals, and the School Supervisor for Bashuki and Bishwamitra Schools. Trainers Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta led many sessions on how the Constructivist theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert and the XO can be used to fully engage children in creating, exploring, and expressing. On the final day of training, the teachers led Constructivist lessons using that XO laptops that they themselves designed. See [http://blog.olenepal.org].
Teacher preparation for Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools begins on Saturday, March 29th. Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta of OLE Nepal are conducting a four-day training session for 24 teachers and officials from Nepal's Department of Education. The training session will focus on general computer literacy for the teachers themselves (the majority of whom have never touched a computer), using computers in the classroom, and child-centered teaching/learning.


6. Story Jam, NYC: SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Henry Edward Hardy and Mel Chua represented OLPC at the OLPC co-sponsored Story Jam New York event at UNICEF's HQ in New York City. Special thanks to Mel Chua who helped organize the event. Among the participants were Ecuador's Ambassador to the US, Luis Gallegos, Ryan Brack, Chief of Staff for the New York City Department of Education, Chris Canizzaro, Research Asst. Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Richard Graves, Program Director of Americans for Informed Democracy, Andy Jordan, Technology Reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online and Matt Lee, Campaign Manager for the Free Software Foundation.
5. School server: John Watlington and Martin Langhoff coordinated a conference call to discuss the School Server Roadmap with a large group of interested parties. General goals and timeframes were covered, and the team will focus hard on the upcoming release, which be tagged 'xs-0.3' (See [[XS Roadmap]] and [[XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes]]).
7. Game Jam Brasil: A GameJam 2008 competition targetting children ages six to 14 is being organized by Professor Lea Fagundes and her colleagues and students (See [[Game_Jam_Brasil/2008]]).


8. Looking ahead: Scott Ananian hosted a mini conference at 1CC Thursday and Friday of this week (See [[Mini-conference]]). Topics included: Frameworks for Collaboration (Ben Schwartz), Suspend/Resume (Richard Smith), Power Management (Chris Ball), UI features (Eben Eliason), olpcfs (Scott Ananian), Communications Outlook (Dafydd Harries), School Server (Martin Langhoff), and State of Security (Michael Stone).
Martin has setup a fully portable build environment, and been cranking out preliminary XS images that contain fixes for some of the blocker bugs for xs-0.3. A local-to-OLPC-hosted build environment for the XS will soon be ready to take over the "xs-dev" role, thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy.


9. MIT: Henry Hardy represented OLPC at International Development night at the MIT museum on Friday, April 4.
Martin and SJ Klein have collected some initial notes on a learning-object distribution strategy heavily inspired in Debian's repository format. Expect to see an edited version in a wiki nearby soon.
10. Multi-battery charger: Lilian Walters and Richard Smith continue to make progress on the multi-battery charger. Richard also began bug triaging and planning for the next round of modifications to go into the EC code for Update 2.


11. i18n: Sayamindu Dasgupta continued to work on making the Pootle server less resource hungry; he is investigating two approaches: Pootle-diet, which caches translation statistics in a simple database; and libgettext-po, which is a PO-file parsing backend for the translate-toolkit. Sayamindu has also managed to clean up and validate the POT files for the OLPC website—he is currently merging the pre-existing translations with the POT files. The laptop.org website will be translatable via Pootle by this weekend.
Documentation updates about the School Server are underway in the wiki, thanks to John Watlington, Martin Langhoff, and volunteers culling updated information from the mailing list.


Walter Bender signed off with Quanta on two new keyboard layouts: one for Nigeria and one for Haiti. Khmer, Nepali, and Italian are queued up. Walter has been working with Bernie Innocenti, Arjun Sarwal, Manusheel Gupta, and Rabi Karmacharya on the integration of compose characters into the X Window System keyboard mapping tables in order to better support Nepali, some West African languages, and to be able to use exclusively "dead keys" with the US International keyboard.
6. Support: Adam Holt helped provoke a very rewarding discussion between guest speaker Ric Holt (SW engineering professor), OLPC's Michael Stone, and the volunteer support team regarding OLPC's software engineering and bug-triaging challenges, including how we will support Update.1 given the concerns and anxiety around Activities "disappearing" as a result of the update process.


The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto.
[As of Update.1, we'll have separated the operating system updates from the activity updates, which may initially give the appearance of activities disappearing. The "customization key" process (See [[Customization_key]]) is intended to facilitate customization of activities; also Bert Freudenberg has written a script to install the default set of activities:


12. Sugar: Tomeu Visozo, Eben Eliason, Marco Presenti Gritti, and Simon Schampijer have been working tirelessly on the Sugar redesign (See [[Designs]]). The first phase has landed in the last Joyride build (1825). It is far from complete, but please to try it and provide feedback.
http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py


Simon reviewed, polished and fixed numerous bugs. Marco has taught him how to build all the relevant sugar packages as part of a transiating process—Marco is only be part-time on the Sugar project and thus cannot be the primary maintainer any longer. Simon built the packages currently in joyride. He also released a new terminal activity that autoscrolls to the bottom when there is input.
Getting the activities back is then as simple as:


Morgan Collett released Chat-37.xo into Joyride, with a UI change as specified by Eben's mockups (See [[Chat]]); multiple sequential messages by the same sender are merged together into the same "bubble", which saves on screen space. Morgan also fixed an alignment problem for right-to-left scripts, e.g. Arabic (Ticket #6561).
wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
python update-activities.py


13. Qirat Activity: Waqas Toor has been working on the new update in light of the feedback received from different volunteers. Based on the prototype reported earlier, now we have five short Surahs (chapters) and Ayat-ul-Kursi (stanza) converted into a read-recite activity (See [[Educational_content_ideas#Memorization_and_Regurgitation_Support]]).
...which works from the ctrl-alt-meshkey console.]


14. OLPC flash: Richard Smith has been working on olpcflash, an application for programming the SPI flash from Linux.
Adam plowed through a "zillion" more shipping/fulfillment tickets with Sandy Culver and Alan Claver as Brightstar completed its final *bulk* shipments to Give One Get One donors. This does *not* mean all shipments have gone out, as some exceptional cases still have to be dealt with over the month of April. Many thanks to our overworked and understaffed volunteers.

Adam organized shipments of broken machines to support volunteers and community and for-profit repair centers (five in the USA, two in Canada, and one in the Netherlands). A spare-parts supply-chain is still badly needed—especially for keyboards—we expect better news in coming weeks.

We'd like to welcome Support Specialist Emily Smith, who will start on Monday, 31 March, 9AM and work through at least the June/July time frame. Emily is brilliant, polished, believing—a library scientist who will be a huge help, even if only a our temp.

7. Sugar/Datastore: Eben Eliason will be giving the sugar-iconify script an overhaul in the near future. Among the changes there are a number for robustness, better error handling, and additional icon validation warnings. More useful to developers, Eben is also adding an option which will export a set of icons rendered in several styles, along with an html preview file, for observing them as they may appear within Sugar. The preview file also contains a list of items to validate the appearance of the icons.

Eben worked out some new visual treatments for object transfers as a core component of the OS (Initial sketches can be seen at [[Specifications/Object Transfers]]). Eben also tackled the problem of palette alerts, for instances where a given icon in the Frame needs to convey additional alert information (eg. low battery, failed transfer, etc.)

Morgan Collette released Chat-36.xo for Joyride/Update.2, with an improvement to open URLs using show_object_in_journal when you click on them. The "copy to clipboard" functionality is still there on rollover at this stage but probably not necessary any more. This release also fixes some minor user
interface issues (Tickets #5053, #6621, and #6743) and also simplifies the telepathy code based on the improved Presence Service channel-creation API in Update.1.

8. Collaboration/Mesh: Chris Ball Worked on release testing and debugging, focusing his efforts mainly around activity sharing with Salut (Ticket #6739). The current status is that activity joining in 703 is reliable against a Jabber server, and fails sporadically on link-local access point or
mesh.

John Watlington continued testing and analysis of data taken in our new Collaboration and Networking Testbed (See [[Collaboration Network Testbed]]). This data indicates that our problems with using mesh networking to connect more than a small number of laptops to a school server seem due to fundamental problems with the routing algorithms used, not flaws in the implementation. More experiments are being run, to test adjustments to the existing algorithms, and possible modifications are already being discussed. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that school deployments use 802.11b/g wireless access points.

Dafydd Harries Worked on improving documentation on the OLPC wiki about how activity sharing/collaboration work; he met with Michael Stone and Jonathan Hertzog to discuss how we might improve communications security in Sugar.

Morgan released Presence Service 0.79.2 for Joyride/Update.2, with improved debugging, and assisted with debugging various sharing failures on Salut (Ticket #6739).

Guillaume Desmottes continued the Salut refactoring. He tracked activity sharing problems (Tickets #6774, #6739, #6483). After investigation they seem to be due to network problems. He wrote a small Salut patch (#6782) improving debug output to help us to track these errors.

9. Releases/Testing: Thanks for all the help testing Update.1 candidate releases 702 and 703 this week! Simon Schampijer set up a wiki page for these test results (See [[Testing Update.1 Results]]) and many have contributed, including Gary Martin, SJ, Eduardo Silva, Michael, Walter, and Chris. Also thanks to Bryan Berry, Kim Quirk, and Scott Ananian for help on the release notes for Update.1, which are beginning to shape up (See [[OLPC Update.1 Software Release Notes]]).

10. Multi-battery charger: Richard Smith spent the week working with the 15-channel multi-battery charger prototype electronics. Testing has flushed out some software bugs, but nothing major so far. Overall the electronics appear to be working as expected. Many of the the mechanical parts have arrived at Gecko, where they have been inspected and approved or feedback submitted the manufacturer. The final parts are scheduled to arrive the week of April 4. Next week, Gecko should able to assemble a full prototype.

11. Active Antennae: John reports that a problem has been found with the cables used in building the 2000 pre-production prototypes (they aren't USB cables), requiring a rework. This will delay the arrival of these antennae for several more weeks. We still have around fifty in stock, so developers and small trials shouldn't be affected.

12. Keyboards: There are about 25 laptop recipients who wrote into the help support-gang looking for replacement keyboards. Membrane keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or "give", of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options.

13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys.

14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work.

15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See [[Food Force]]).

16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See [[JS-Python]]). She has recently been selected in the elite group of "25 Best Women Engineering Students of India" by Google. Congrats Preeti!

Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that "the cursor just moves" when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a "comment" property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO.

17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See [[Activities]] and [[Develop]]). "It really works! Not just a toy."


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 15:05, 5 April 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 123328]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-04-05

1. Peru: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Peru regarding this week's teacher preparation workshops. Teachers in four locations—Huancayo, Huampani, Chiclayo, and Arequipa—spent the week exploring the XO laptop—running the new software release, Build 703—and engaging in pedagogical discussions about technology and learning.

2. Mongolia: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin returned from Mongolia with news that a steering committee chaired by the MoE has been formed to oversee the deployment of the first 10000 laptops in Mongolia. Already, a campaign is underway to raise money for one laptop per child in all of Mongolia. The media coverage has been voluminous and the children at the two pilot schools have been thriving. The President of Mongolia remarked: "In the past, Mongolians explored the world by horseback. Today they will explore it with their laptops."

3. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Pakistan that the program at the Atlas School is going very well, with the children's excitement accelerating day by day. For the first two weeks, the children concentrated on music (Tam Tam) and video (Record). Presently, they are using the Write activity. They are fond of using the library to read story books in Farsi and to browse through maps. They also the multimedia activity (Watch & Listen), which they use to play music.The 5th graders have explored Etoys and are helping the younger children as well.

4. Senegal: OLPC at IDLELO3: Fatimata Seye Sylla presented OLPC at the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) in Dakar Senegal. Under the theme "Making the knowledge economy work for Africa", this 3rd conference gathered hundreds of experts, decision makers, educators, and media experts from 20 different countries to exchange about the use of Free and Open source software for the development of Africa. OLPC had a booth manned by school children showing off their proficiency with Sugar.

5. Nepal: Dev Mohanty has posted online how he and Mahabir Pun are using inexpensive wireless equipment to connect Bishwamitra and Bashuki pilot schools to the Internet and each other. The wireless network has an effective bandwidth of 8 Mbps between nodes (See [1]).

The OLE Nepal team led four days of teacher training for 24 teachers, two community members, two school principals, and the School Supervisor for Bashuki and Bishwamitra Schools. Trainers Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta led many sessions on how the Constructivist theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert and the XO can be used to fully engage children in creating, exploring, and expressing. On the final day of training, the teachers led Constructivist lessons using that XO laptops that they themselves designed. See [2].

6. Story Jam, NYC: SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Henry Edward Hardy and Mel Chua represented OLPC at the OLPC co-sponsored Story Jam New York event at UNICEF's HQ in New York City. Special thanks to Mel Chua who helped organize the event. Among the participants were Ecuador's Ambassador to the US, Luis Gallegos, Ryan Brack, Chief of Staff for the New York City Department of Education, Chris Canizzaro, Research Asst. Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Richard Graves, Program Director of Americans for Informed Democracy, Andy Jordan, Technology Reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online and Matt Lee, Campaign Manager for the Free Software Foundation.

7. Game Jam Brasil: A GameJam 2008 competition targetting children ages six to 14 is being organized by Professor Lea Fagundes and her colleagues and students (See Game_Jam_Brasil/2008).

8. Looking ahead: Scott Ananian hosted a mini conference at 1CC Thursday and Friday of this week (See Mini-conference). Topics included: Frameworks for Collaboration (Ben Schwartz), Suspend/Resume (Richard Smith), Power Management (Chris Ball), UI features (Eben Eliason), olpcfs (Scott Ananian), Communications Outlook (Dafydd Harries), School Server (Martin Langhoff), and State of Security (Michael Stone).

9. MIT: Henry Hardy represented OLPC at International Development night at the MIT museum on Friday, April 4.

10. Multi-battery charger: Lilian Walters and Richard Smith continue to make progress on the multi-battery charger. Richard also began bug triaging and planning for the next round of modifications to go into the EC code for Update 2.

11. i18n: Sayamindu Dasgupta continued to work on making the Pootle server less resource hungry; he is investigating two approaches: Pootle-diet, which caches translation statistics in a simple database; and libgettext-po, which is a PO-file parsing backend for the translate-toolkit. Sayamindu has also managed to clean up and validate the POT files for the OLPC website—he is currently merging the pre-existing translations with the POT files. The laptop.org website will be translatable via Pootle by this weekend.

Walter Bender signed off with Quanta on two new keyboard layouts: one for Nigeria and one for Haiti. Khmer, Nepali, and Italian are queued up. Walter has been working with Bernie Innocenti, Arjun Sarwal, Manusheel Gupta, and Rabi Karmacharya on the integration of compose characters into the X Window System keyboard mapping tables in order to better support Nepali, some West African languages, and to be able to use exclusively "dead keys" with the US International keyboard.

The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto.

12. Sugar: Tomeu Visozo, Eben Eliason, Marco Presenti Gritti, and Simon Schampijer have been working tirelessly on the Sugar redesign (See Designs). The first phase has landed in the last Joyride build (1825). It is far from complete, but please to try it and provide feedback.

Simon reviewed, polished and fixed numerous bugs. Marco has taught him how to build all the relevant sugar packages as part of a transiating process—Marco is only be part-time on the Sugar project and thus cannot be the primary maintainer any longer. Simon built the packages currently in joyride. He also released a new terminal activity that autoscrolls to the bottom when there is input.

Morgan Collett released Chat-37.xo into Joyride, with a UI change as specified by Eben's mockups (See Chat); multiple sequential messages by the same sender are merged together into the same "bubble", which saves on screen space. Morgan also fixed an alignment problem for right-to-left scripts, e.g. Arabic (Ticket #6561).

13. Qirat Activity: Waqas Toor has been working on the new update in light of the feedback received from different volunteers. Based on the prototype reported earlier, now we have five short Surahs (chapters) and Ayat-ul-Kursi (stanza) converted into a read-recite activity (See Educational_content_ideas#Memorization_and_Regurgitation_Support).

14. OLPC flash: Richard Smith has been working on olpcflash, an application for programming the SPI flash from Linux.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 123328]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-04-05

1. Peru: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Peru regarding this week's teacher preparation workshops. Teachers in four locations—Huancayo, Huampani, Chiclayo, and Arequipa—spent the week exploring the XO laptop—running the new software release, Build 703—and engaging in pedagogical discussions about technology and learning.

2. Mongolia: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin returned from Mongolia with news that a steering committee chaired by the MoE has been formed to oversee the deployment of the first 10000 laptops in Mongolia. Already, a campaign is underway to raise money for one laptop per child in all of Mongolia. The media coverage has been voluminous and the children at the two pilot schools have been thriving. The President of Mongolia remarked: "In the past, Mongolians explored the world by horseback. Today they will explore it with their laptops."

3. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Pakistan that the program at the Atlas School is going very well, with the children's excitement accelerating day by day. For the first two weeks, the children concentrated on music (Tam Tam) and video (Record). Presently, they are using the Write activity. They are fond of using the library to read story books in Farsi and to browse through maps. They also the multimedia activity (Watch & Listen), which they use to play music.The 5th graders have explored Etoys and are helping the younger children as well.

4. Senegal: OLPC at IDLELO3: Fatimata Seye Sylla presented OLPC at the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) in Dakar Senegal. Under the theme "Making the knowledge economy work for Africa", this 3rd conference gathered hundreds of experts, decision makers, educators, and media experts from 20 different countries to exchange about the use of Free and Open source software for the development of Africa. OLPC had a booth manned by school children showing off their proficiency with Sugar.

5. Nepal: Dev Mohanty has posted online how he and Mahabir Pun are using inexpensive wireless equipment to connect Bishwamitra and Bashuki pilot schools to the Internet and each other. The wireless network has an effective bandwidth of 8 Mbps between nodes (See [3]).

The OLE Nepal team led four days of teacher training for 24 teachers, two community members, two school principals, and the School Supervisor for Bashuki and Bishwamitra Schools. Trainers Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta led many sessions on how the Constructivist theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert and the XO can be used to fully engage children in creating, exploring, and expressing. On the final day of training, the teachers led Constructivist lessons using that XO laptops that they themselves designed. See [4].

6. Story Jam, NYC: SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Henry Edward Hardy and Mel Chua represented OLPC at the OLPC co-sponsored Story Jam New York event at UNICEF's HQ in New York City. Special thanks to Mel Chua who helped organize the event. Among the participants were Ecuador's Ambassador to the US, Luis Gallegos, Ryan Brack, Chief of Staff for the New York City Department of Education, Chris Canizzaro, Research Asst. Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Richard Graves, Program Director of Americans for Informed Democracy, Andy Jordan, Technology Reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online and Matt Lee, Campaign Manager for the Free Software Foundation.

7. Game Jam Brasil: A GameJam 2008 competition targetting children ages six to 14 is being organized by Professor Lea Fagundes and her colleagues and students (See Game_Jam_Brasil/2008).

8. Looking ahead: Scott Ananian hosted a mini conference at 1CC Thursday and Friday of this week (See Mini-conference). Topics included: Frameworks for Collaboration (Ben Schwartz), Suspend/Resume (Richard Smith), Power Management (Chris Ball), UI features (Eben Eliason), olpcfs (Scott Ananian), Communications Outlook (Dafydd Harries), School Server (Martin Langhoff), and State of Security (Michael Stone).

9. MIT: Henry Hardy represented OLPC at International Development night at the MIT museum on Friday, April 4.

10. Multi-battery charger: Lilian Walters and Richard Smith continue to make progress on the multi-battery charger. Richard also began bug triaging and planning for the next round of modifications to go into the EC code for Update 2.

11. i18n: Sayamindu Dasgupta continued to work on making the Pootle server less resource hungry; he is investigating two approaches: Pootle-diet, which caches translation statistics in a simple database; and libgettext-po, which is a PO-file parsing backend for the translate-toolkit. Sayamindu has also managed to clean up and validate the POT files for the OLPC website—he is currently merging the pre-existing translations with the POT files. The laptop.org website will be translatable via Pootle by this weekend.

Walter Bender signed off with Quanta on two new keyboard layouts: one for Nigeria and one for Haiti. Khmer, Nepali, and Italian are queued up. Walter has been working with Bernie Innocenti, Arjun Sarwal, Manusheel Gupta, and Rabi Karmacharya on the integration of compose characters into the X Window System keyboard mapping tables in order to better support Nepali, some West African languages, and to be able to use exclusively "dead keys" with the US International keyboard.

The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto.

12. Sugar: Tomeu Visozo, Eben Eliason, Marco Presenti Gritti, and Simon Schampijer have been working tirelessly on the Sugar redesign (See Designs). The first phase has landed in the last Joyride build (1825). It is far from complete, but please to try it and provide feedback.

Simon reviewed, polished and fixed numerous bugs. Marco has taught him how to build all the relevant sugar packages as part of a transiating process—Marco is only be part-time on the Sugar project and thus cannot be the primary maintainer any longer. Simon built the packages currently in joyride. He also released a new terminal activity that autoscrolls to the bottom when there is input.

Morgan Collett released Chat-37.xo into Joyride, with a UI change as specified by Eben's mockups (See Chat); multiple sequential messages by the same sender are merged together into the same "bubble", which saves on screen space. Morgan also fixed an alignment problem for right-to-left scripts, e.g. Arabic (Ticket #6561).

13. Qirat Activity: Waqas Toor has been working on the new update in light of the feedback received from different volunteers. Based on the prototype reported earlier, now we have five short Surahs (chapters) and Ayat-ul-Kursi (stanza) converted into a read-recite activity (See Educational_content_ideas#Memorization_and_Regurgitation_Support).

14. OLPC flash: Richard Smith has been working on olpcflash, an application for programming the SPI flash from Linux.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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