OLPC Chicago

About

The Chicago Interest Group is a way for people in the Chicagoland area to talk about and work together on OLPC. We aren't necessarily interested just in trying to bring OLPC into classrooms in Illinois; we're also interested in volunteering/contributing to the project.

OLPC Chicago IS

1. a nucleation point for exchange between local groups, towards the OLPC Boston office and back, and with other groups worldwide
2. helping in organizing XOs for the local groups
3. supporting and cherishing the autonomy of local groups
4. focusing on rough consensus, grassroots involvement, and working projects

OLPC Chicago IS NOT

1. going to do a local pilot in your school (although we'll encourage and support you if you want to do one yourself)
2. going to tell you what you are and aren't allowed to do (although we're always up for idea-bouncing and brainstorms)

(Thanks to OLPC Europe, from which the above lists are adapted.)

Contact and chapters

Mailing list

We have most of our Chicago-wide, intra-chapter discussions on the mailing list. If you are interested, please subscribe.

Flickr Group

OLPC Chicago has a OLPC_Chicago Flickr group for photos of meetups, pictures of modifications to our XOs, etc. Please join!

IMSA chapter

IMSA is a public high school in Aurora.

MVCC chapter

MVCC is a community college in Palos Hills.

OLPC Chicago Jabber server

OLPC Chicago Jabber Server is jabber.olpchacks.org.

To setup your XO, open the terminal activity and type:

  % sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.olpchacks.org

Restart Sugar/X (ctrl-alt-erase) and you will connect to the jabber server.

Future Activities

• Mar 13 2008 - MVCC is going to have a mini-Repair Jam. The objectives of the Jam will be to create a detailed log of issues discovered with the 12 machines from D stock and M stock, attempt to fix some broken components rather than just replace them, and develop and document a Troubleshooting and Repair Plan.

Past activities

• Mar 29 2008 - Tentatively, MVCC will have another informal meetup. Anyone is welcome - an invitation will be broadcast to the OLPC-Chicago group and MVCC faculty and staff. At this meet we met an incredibly technologically savvy teen who typed up a detailed walkthrough on everything he does to customize his XO. There is lots of useful guides all in one place at Ben Rothman's XO Setup.
• The Illinois School for the Deaf and their XO pilot (in Jacksonville, IL) was featured on myjournalcourier - read the article and see some photos of the children with their laptops.
• March 6 2008 - The technology committee of the IL House of Representatives unanimously passed the /IL Children's Low Cost Laptop Fund, which is now moving to the House and Senate for review. See the page for a first-hand account by Larry Langellier.
• Feb 16 2008 - There was a meetup at MVCC to explore the XO more deeply, specifically the mesh capability. Seven adults and nine children were present. Highlights included introductions to OLPC and the XO for newcomers, an introduction to Scratch and the community site at scratch.mit.edu, and some of the children in attendance showed us how to use the mesh for Chat and Connect.
• Feb 5 2008 - Meetup at Marie Murphy School. Karen's blog writeup and Joe's blog post
• /Jan 26 2008 - There was a meetup at MVCC to introduce the project, play with laptops, and come up with ideas for things the MVCC chapter could work on. Highlights included TamTam demos by an 8-year-old and Record demos by a 10-year-old, as well as a kid-run laptop disassembly session.
• /Jan 22 2008- The first COGG (Chicago-OLPC Grassroots Group) meeting was Jan 22, 2008 at Google Chicago. IMSA students and others presented their projects, connections were made, and small interest groups were formed. For more information, including notes and blogs from the meeting, click here.
• /Jun 02 2007 - Hackathon at SkinnyCorp.

Project ideas

• We're thinking about working on Choose Your Own Adventure.
• TinyLanguage is a comprehension-based language learning tool.

Summer projects: Definite

These projects should get their own project pages as soon as possible, and the information on this page should move out there and be replaced by a simple link to the project page and a short description. The {{{Template:Project}}} template may help.

Off-grid power generation

Prototyping chargers with the intent of turning out not just some finished designs, but a reference that others can start from for making their own completely different charger designs (basic electronics, specs, materials sources, etc - an off-grid-power cookbook that encourages experimentation.)

Who's doing it =

• Chris Carrick: full-time summer staff, mechanical engineer specializing in appropriate technology, taking this on as his primary project
• IMSA (probably - details need working out)
• Want to help? Sign up and contact the people above.

Who else should do it

• Local engineers with power generation experience
• People looking for ways to improve their basic mechanical fabrication skills (FIRST robotics students have the perfect kind of experience for some of this)

XO accessibility

Develop peripherals and software so that kids with special needs can use the XO more effectively, focusing on creating adaptations for specific young users by working alongside special needs children and their teachers and parents to design a solution that works for them. Example projects could include an illuminated audio notifier, (improved) screen reader, head tracker mouse, etc - but also exploring possible uses of existing equipment for this purpose - for example, Write being collaborative might mean a deaf child can have his friends help him take lecture notes in class, a game based on Record where children dance in front of the camera to "hit" virtual objects on the screen with a colored sheet of paper could be used for physical therapy by a girl with cerebral palsy, etc. As part of this project, a generic USB peripheral development kit will probably be created. This project dovetails quite closely in places with existing Health efforts, and we'll communicate heavily with that group.

Who's doing it

• Mel Chua: full-time summer staff, electrical and computer enginer and programmer, hearing impaired, taking this on as a half-time project.
• Want to help? Sign up and contact the people above.

Who else should do it

• Local hospitals?
• Local associations for disabled children?
• Special ed teachers?
• Physical therapists?
• Kids (or former kids) with "special needs"?

Pilot datasharing gear-up

The question of "what happens when you put these in a school?" needs to be seriously tackled at an education research level; what sort of questions/projects/people/infrastructure need to be put in place to get a good local meta-understanding of what's happening in your classrooms, and how can we prototype processes that make it easy for pilots to share this data with each other and external researchers, and for everyone to work with and use the data that's given?

Who's doing it

• Mel Chua would like to work on this, but probably doesn't have the time or expertise to do so. Any takers?

Projects, Under consideration

Add your proposals here!

Repair Centers In A Box

A hardware/software/entrepreneurship/resource kit that will need as little translation as possible (non-linguistic design - heavy use of pictures and simple vocabulary to communicate possibly complex topics).

Who's doing it

• Proposed by Mel Chua, who is willing to help refine the proposal and test the finish product, but doesn't have time to do it

Who else should do it

• MVCC?
• Other repair center groups in the area?
• In conjunction with Support gang and Adam Holt?

School servers

This has three parts.

1. WAN school server accessible to Chicago area XO users. Probably remote admin access to those who are interested in seeing how this end of things works and looks. no local mesh antennas needed.
2. School server for the Lab-In-A-Van. Full mesh.
3. School servers for seed labs. Single mesh antenna.

Now that there's an off the shelf spec for a XSX school server (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XSX_Server_Implementation), it should be practical to roll our own. The spec notes an Athenatech 600 Series Mid-Tower case. The first samples have a really boring silver and black one. The same internals are available in jazzier externals with color, all at about the same price. How about #605 cases with XO green trim? http://www.athenatech.us/ -- click on 'A600 (MidTower)', scroll down to A605.

The Active antennas also look like they should be getting easier to obtain.

Who is involved

• Bob Myers: I'd be willing to help assemble and load the servers.
• Mark Romz: I have a couple PCs that I am decommissioning. Perhaps one of these could be used as a school server? (Sorry I haven't had time to review the required specs on the wiki). If the hardware is compatible and someone is willing to perform the configuration, you're welcome to it. If we keep it in my office, I could put it on the WAN (low priority bandwidth, but I'm assuming that it does not need much?)

Name of project

Description goes here

Who's doing it

• Original proposer, add your name here

People looking for projects

Nikki Lee

Full-time summer staff, electrical and computer engineer, artist, experienced University chapter organizer and Support gang member running the first prototype Repair center and coordinating the Art community

What should I do?

• Repair center in a box
• Information design
• Cultivate local art community
• Open FirmWare (OFW)
• Wireless mesh testing
• Sensors & peripherals
• Screen Reader/Accessibility
• add your suggestions

Your name here

Tell us about yourself, including availability.

What should I do?

• add your suggestions

Resources for OLPC_Chicago

• OLPC_Chicago Resources - Karen Smith's note of 2/14/08 with a summary of online resources for OLPC Chicago and other tips and tricks, collected from available resources. Please add to this list!
• Ben Rothman's XO Setup is a teens detailed list of everything he does to customize his XO from the beginning. It is a great resource for saving time by conveniently containing setup of Flash, Opera, and getting rid of some core programs that just get in the way. He will also be updating it as soon as we figure out how to get java working on the XO.