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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 2008-04-05=
=Laptop News 2008-04-12=


1. Marvin Minksy has been writing a series of essays on learning. The first three essays are available on the wiki (See [[Marvin Minsky essays]]). The themes to date include "What makes Mathematics hard to learn?", "Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation", "What’s wrong with the 50-minute hour", "Role Models, Mentors, and Imprimers and Thinking", "Thinking about Thinking about Ways to Think", "How do children acquire self-images?", and "Finding Mentors in Network Communities."
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. OLE Nepal have posted their teacher preparation materials to the wiki. The materials cover basic use of the XO, constructionist theory and practice, and using the XO to facilitate the learning process. Bipul Gautam created the 63-page teacher Preparation guide, which is entirely in Nepali. Prabhas Pokharel has agreed to organize a group of Nepali Harvard students to translate it into English (See [[Nepal: Teacher Preparation]]).
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. Bryan Berry has created a basic training program for support personnel that are familiar with computers, but new to the XO hardware and Linux (See [[Nepal: Support Training]]). Teachers Manoj Ghimire of Bishwamitra and Neema Lama of Bashuki were the first trainees to use these materials.
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. Hot topics: This week saw debates on some of the OLPC mailing lists and in the wiki. A paper called "Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model" will be presented on Monday at USENIX UPSEC'08 (http://www.usenix.org/events/upsec08/tech/tech.html). You can read the paper (http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1042.pdf) and view the discussion to date on in the archives of the OLPC security list (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/security/2008-April/000388.html). Another discussion has been in regard to build and release strategy (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012318.html and [[User:Mstone/August planning]]). Michael Stone has documented a conversation that he, Jameson Chema Quinn, Chris Ball, and Robert McQueen had about the UI problems posed by our current bundle format (See [[User:Mstone/Bundle commentary]] and [[Bundles and updates]]). And finally the new Sugar interface was the topic of discussion in the sugar list (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/004909.html). In the wiki, Chris Leonard and Charles Merriam have been working on some naming conventions to make it easier to navigate the almost 6000 content pages in the wiki (See [[Conventions]]).
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. Where did all the activities go? There still seems to be some confusion around the process of loading activity bundles post-Build 703. Please refer to [[Customization key]] for instructions regarding bulk loading of activities.
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]).


6. JS-Python Communication: K.S. Preeti has been working with Manusheel Gupta, Dan Bricklin, and Luke Closs to enable JS-Python communication using PyXPCOM. They have been successful in creating an XPCOM service in JavaScript that exposes the JS code to the Browser; and an XPCOM service in Python that exposes the Python code to the Browser. The aim for this week would be to synchronously call both these services from the same interface that will lead to communication between functions written in JS, and Python. The details on the implementation of XPCOM service have been updated (See [[JSPython]]). SocialCalc (Spreadsheet activity), written in JavaSript, will be ported to Sugar using this mechanism.
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].
7. Educational Toolkit: Manusheel Gupta has been working with Deepank Gupta, Ross Light, and David Goulet to develop an Educational Toolkit. Use-case diagrams, and XML schema have been updated (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_toolkit). The implementation of Parse Module, supporting decoding of XML files; Viewer Module; and ConnectionManager module are in progress (See http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/Educational_toolkit).
8. More magic from Benjamin M. Schwartz: Ben has made a DOS Console activity based on Wine (See http://dev.laptop.org/~bemasc/DOSConsole-1.xo). His goal is to provide a simple system for turning any Windows program into a Sugar activity. This is still a work in progress: in order for it to run, you must first add 'org.winehq.WineConsole' to the list of RAINBOW_CONSTANT_UID activities in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py and it doesn't yet "play well with others." However, Chris Ball used already used it to installed the free-download Excel viewer (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/xo-excel.jpg).


9. David Hodge reports that ACM and Free Culture USC have partnered up for an upcoming "Code for a Cause" programming event next week at USC. The focus will be on open-source software and the OLPC platform. Student teams will be challenged over a week-long period to develop open-source software for the OLPC platform (See http://codeforacause.net).
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]]).


10. Kurt Gramlich would like the OLPC community know about the latest LiveCD release (See [[LiveBackup_XO-LiveCD]]). Aaron Kaplan talks about his port of Sugar to the Intel Classmate (http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/sugar_on_classmate_pc.html) using the LiveCD. Additional information is available (in German) on linux-user.com (See http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/04/024/).
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).


11. Scott Ananian sends his thanks to everyone who participated in last week's mini conference and requests that you upload your slides to the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mini-conference). If anyone would like to volunteer to help with transcoding of the video archive of the conferenc, please contact Scott at laptop.org.
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.


12. Kevin Cole reports that the OLPC Learning Club DC (OLPC LCDC) held their second "Family Mesh" meetings at Gallaudet University in NW Washington, DC (See http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/showing-scratch/).
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.


13. Richard Smith and SJ Klein will present the XO laptop and alternative power systems at two workshops at the Massachusetts Power Shift 2008 (MAPS) conference.
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.


14. Prakhar Agarwal reports progress on the typing tutor activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LetsType#Progress_so_far) and is soliciting feedback.
The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto.


15. Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that the Pakistan Software Export Board has graciously provided OLPC Pakistan the services of an in intern, Ms. Iffat Saadia. Iffat is a developer; she is converting Biology of 8th grade into interactive ebook.
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.


A second pilot project is being prepared at the Mehfooz Shahid Dil Model School, located in a beautiful valley in the Islamabad, Capital Territory. The school has five grades with 170 children. On Monday a week of teacher preparation begins. The school was identified with help from the National Rural Support Program (http://www.nrsp.org.pk).
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.


16. Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has been conducting more tests with Cerebro. File transfer and chat work consistently on a 30-node testbed. (Chris Ball modified the Chat activity; we now have a version that works with Cerebro and we are in the process of creating a build where Chat and Read will be using Cerebro. This build will be tested on the 100-node testbed to investigate the limits of simple mesh.)
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=
=More News=

Revision as of 13:47, 12 April 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 125311]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-04-12

1. Marvin Minksy has been writing a series of essays on learning. The first three essays are available on the wiki (See Marvin Minsky essays). The themes to date include "What makes Mathematics hard to learn?", "Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation", "What’s wrong with the 50-minute hour", "Role Models, Mentors, and Imprimers and Thinking", "Thinking about Thinking about Ways to Think", "How do children acquire self-images?", and "Finding Mentors in Network Communities."

2. OLE Nepal have posted their teacher preparation materials to the wiki. The materials cover basic use of the XO, constructionist theory and practice, and using the XO to facilitate the learning process. Bipul Gautam created the 63-page teacher Preparation guide, which is entirely in Nepali. Prabhas Pokharel has agreed to organize a group of Nepali Harvard students to translate it into English (See Nepal: Teacher Preparation).

3. Bryan Berry has created a basic training program for support personnel that are familiar with computers, but new to the XO hardware and Linux (See Nepal: Support Training). Teachers Manoj Ghimire of Bishwamitra and Neema Lama of Bashuki were the first trainees to use these materials.

4. Hot topics: This week saw debates on some of the OLPC mailing lists and in the wiki. A paper called "Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model" will be presented on Monday at USENIX UPSEC'08 (http://www.usenix.org/events/upsec08/tech/tech.html). You can read the paper (http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1042.pdf) and view the discussion to date on in the archives of the OLPC security list (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/security/2008-April/000388.html). Another discussion has been in regard to build and release strategy (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012318.html and User:Mstone/August planning). Michael Stone has documented a conversation that he, Jameson Chema Quinn, Chris Ball, and Robert McQueen had about the UI problems posed by our current bundle format (See User:Mstone/Bundle commentary and Bundles and updates). And finally the new Sugar interface was the topic of discussion in the sugar list (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/004909.html). In the wiki, Chris Leonard and Charles Merriam have been working on some naming conventions to make it easier to navigate the almost 6000 content pages in the wiki (See Conventions).

5. Where did all the activities go? There still seems to be some confusion around the process of loading activity bundles post-Build 703. Please refer to Customization key for instructions regarding bulk loading of activities.

6. JS-Python Communication: K.S. Preeti has been working with Manusheel Gupta, Dan Bricklin, and Luke Closs to enable JS-Python communication using PyXPCOM. They have been successful in creating an XPCOM service in JavaScript that exposes the JS code to the Browser; and an XPCOM service in Python that exposes the Python code to the Browser. The aim for this week would be to synchronously call both these services from the same interface that will lead to communication between functions written in JS, and Python. The details on the implementation of XPCOM service have been updated (See JSPython). SocialCalc (Spreadsheet activity), written in JavaSript, will be ported to Sugar using this mechanism.

7. Educational Toolkit: Manusheel Gupta has been working with Deepank Gupta, Ross Light, and David Goulet to develop an Educational Toolkit. Use-case diagrams, and XML schema have been updated (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_toolkit). The implementation of Parse Module, supporting decoding of XML files; Viewer Module; and ConnectionManager module are in progress (See http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/Educational_toolkit).

8. More magic from Benjamin M. Schwartz: Ben has made a DOS Console activity based on Wine (See http://dev.laptop.org/~bemasc/DOSConsole-1.xo). His goal is to provide a simple system for turning any Windows program into a Sugar activity. This is still a work in progress: in order for it to run, you must first add 'org.winehq.WineConsole' to the list of RAINBOW_CONSTANT_UID activities in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py and it doesn't yet "play well with others." However, Chris Ball used already used it to installed the free-download Excel viewer (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/xo-excel.jpg).

9. David Hodge reports that ACM and Free Culture USC have partnered up for an upcoming "Code for a Cause" programming event next week at USC. The focus will be on open-source software and the OLPC platform. Student teams will be challenged over a week-long period to develop open-source software for the OLPC platform (See http://codeforacause.net).

10. Kurt Gramlich would like the OLPC community know about the latest LiveCD release (See LiveBackup_XO-LiveCD). Aaron Kaplan talks about his port of Sugar to the Intel Classmate (http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/sugar_on_classmate_pc.html) using the LiveCD. Additional information is available (in German) on linux-user.com (See http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/04/024/).

11. Scott Ananian sends his thanks to everyone who participated in last week's mini conference and requests that you upload your slides to the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mini-conference). If anyone would like to volunteer to help with transcoding of the video archive of the conferenc, please contact Scott at laptop.org.

12. Kevin Cole reports that the OLPC Learning Club DC (OLPC LCDC) held their second "Family Mesh" meetings at Gallaudet University in NW Washington, DC (See http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/showing-scratch/).

13. Richard Smith and SJ Klein will present the XO laptop and alternative power systems at two workshops at the Massachusetts Power Shift 2008 (MAPS) conference.

14. Prakhar Agarwal reports progress on the typing tutor activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LetsType#Progress_so_far) and is soliciting feedback.

15. Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that the Pakistan Software Export Board has graciously provided OLPC Pakistan the services of an in intern, Ms. Iffat Saadia. Iffat is a developer; she is converting Biology of 8th grade into interactive ebook.

A second pilot project is being prepared at the Mehfooz Shahid Dil Model School, located in a beautiful valley in the Islamabad, Capital Territory. The school has five grades with 170 children. On Monday a week of teacher preparation begins. The school was identified with help from the National Rural Support Program (http://www.nrsp.org.pk).

16. Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has been conducting more tests with Cerebro. File transfer and chat work consistently on a 30-node testbed. (Chris Ball modified the Chat activity; we now have a version that works with Cerebro and we are in the process of creating a build where Chat and Read will be using Cerebro. This build will be tested on the 100-node testbed to investigate the limits of simple mesh.)

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# 125311]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-04-12

1. Marvin Minksy has been writing a series of essays on learning. The first three essays are available on the wiki (See Marvin Minsky essays). The themes to date include "What makes Mathematics hard to learn?", "Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation", "What’s wrong with the 50-minute hour", "Role Models, Mentors, and Imprimers and Thinking", "Thinking about Thinking about Ways to Think", "How do children acquire self-images?", and "Finding Mentors in Network Communities."

2. OLE Nepal have posted their teacher preparation materials to the wiki. The materials cover basic use of the XO, constructionist theory and practice, and using the XO to facilitate the learning process. Bipul Gautam created the 63-page teacher Preparation guide, which is entirely in Nepali. Prabhas Pokharel has agreed to organize a group of Nepali Harvard students to translate it into English (See Nepal: Teacher Preparation).

3. Bryan Berry has created a basic training program for support personnel that are familiar with computers, but new to the XO hardware and Linux (See Nepal: Support Training). Teachers Manoj Ghimire of Bishwamitra and Neema Lama of Bashuki were the first trainees to use these materials.

4. Hot topics: This week saw debates on some of the OLPC mailing lists and in the wiki. A paper called "Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model" will be presented on Monday at USENIX UPSEC'08 (http://www.usenix.org/events/upsec08/tech/tech.html). You can read the paper (http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1042.pdf) and view the discussion to date on in the archives of the OLPC security list (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/security/2008-April/000388.html). Another discussion has been in regard to build and release strategy (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012318.html and User:Mstone/August planning). Michael Stone has documented a conversation that he, Jameson Chema Quinn, Chris Ball, and Robert McQueen had about the UI problems posed by our current bundle format (See User:Mstone/Bundle commentary and Bundles and updates). And finally the new Sugar interface was the topic of discussion in the sugar list (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/004909.html). In the wiki, Chris Leonard and Charles Merriam have been working on some naming conventions to make it easier to navigate the almost 6000 content pages in the wiki (See Conventions).

5. Where did all the activities go? There still seems to be some confusion around the process of loading activity bundles post-Build 703. Please refer to Customization key for instructions regarding bulk loading of activities.

6. JS-Python Communication: K.S. Preeti has been working with Manusheel Gupta, Dan Bricklin, and Luke Closs to enable JS-Python communication using PyXPCOM. They have been successful in creating an XPCOM service in JavaScript that exposes the JS code to the Browser; and an XPCOM service in Python that exposes the Python code to the Browser. The aim for this week would be to synchronously call both these services from the same interface that will lead to communication between functions written in JS, and Python. The details on the implementation of XPCOM service have been updated (See JSPython). SocialCalc (Spreadsheet activity), written in JavaSript, will be ported to Sugar using this mechanism.

7. Educational Toolkit: Manusheel Gupta has been working with Deepank Gupta, Ross Light, and David Goulet to develop an Educational Toolkit. Use-case diagrams, and XML schema have been updated (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_toolkit). The implementation of Parse Module, supporting decoding of XML files; Viewer Module; and ConnectionManager module are in progress (See http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/Educational_toolkit).

8. More magic from Benjamin M. Schwartz: Ben has made a DOS Console activity based on Wine (See http://dev.laptop.org/~bemasc/DOSConsole-1.xo). His goal is to provide a simple system for turning any Windows program into a Sugar activity. This is still a work in progress: in order for it to run, you must first add 'org.winehq.WineConsole' to the list of RAINBOW_CONSTANT_UID activities in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py and it doesn't yet "play well with others." However, Chris Ball used already used it to installed the free-download Excel viewer (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/xo-excel.jpg).

9. David Hodge reports that ACM and Free Culture USC have partnered up for an upcoming "Code for a Cause" programming event next week at USC. The focus will be on open-source software and the OLPC platform. Student teams will be challenged over a week-long period to develop open-source software for the OLPC platform (See http://codeforacause.net).

10. Kurt Gramlich would like the OLPC community know about the latest LiveCD release (See LiveBackup_XO-LiveCD). Aaron Kaplan talks about his port of Sugar to the Intel Classmate (http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/sugar_on_classmate_pc.html) using the LiveCD. Additional information is available (in German) on linux-user.com (See http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/04/024/).

11. Scott Ananian sends his thanks to everyone who participated in last week's mini conference and requests that you upload your slides to the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mini-conference). If anyone would like to volunteer to help with transcoding of the video archive of the conferenc, please contact Scott at laptop.org.

12. Kevin Cole reports that the OLPC Learning Club DC (OLPC LCDC) held their second "Family Mesh" meetings at Gallaudet University in NW Washington, DC (See http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/showing-scratch/).

13. Richard Smith and SJ Klein will present the XO laptop and alternative power systems at two workshops at the Massachusetts Power Shift 2008 (MAPS) conference.

14. Prakhar Agarwal reports progress on the typing tutor activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LetsType#Progress_so_far) and is soliciting feedback.

15. Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that the Pakistan Software Export Board has graciously provided OLPC Pakistan the services of an in intern, Ms. Iffat Saadia. Iffat is a developer; she is converting Biology of 8th grade into interactive ebook.

A second pilot project is being prepared at the Mehfooz Shahid Dil Model School, located in a beautiful valley in the Islamabad, Capital Territory. The school has five grades with 170 children. On Monday a week of teacher preparation begins. The school was identified with help from the National Rural Support Program (http://www.nrsp.org.pk).

16. Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has been conducting more tests with Cerebro. File transfer and chat work consistently on a 30-node testbed. (Chris Ball modified the Chat activity; we now have a version that works with Cerebro and we are in the process of creating a build where Chat and Read will be using Cerebro. This build will be tested on the 100-node testbed to investigate the limits of simple mesh.)

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. 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