Cambridge Friends School

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

Status

This proposal is a rough draft right now, intended as a strawman for discussion and revision so we can get a real proposal (and then a program) rolling as fast as possible.

It's not a terribly formal doc. The reason for this is that formal documents are rather dull to write (and read) and we want people to read this, comment, and contribute. We care about the content and how much it makes sense to other people more than we care about presenting this in accordance with some hypothetical protocol. Irreverence may ensue. You have been warned.

Introduction

Disclaimer: Please bear with us. We haven't done this before. Comments, criticisms, feedback, and suggestions for improvement are always tremendously welcome - leave a note on the talk page.

The short version: Give each 1st and 6th grader an XO, then run a "learning buddies" program that pairs them up to explore how they can integrate the XO as a tool into the existing CFS curriculum.

This document is a proposal for an One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilot for the 2008-2009 school year to be run in classrooms representative of the age range of students at Cambridge Friends School (CFS), a private pre-K to 8 school in Massachusetts. The main points of the program (aside from giving each child, teacher, and relevant administrator a low-cost, rugged laptop running open-source educational software, to be owned by them and used as a personal learning tool and information access point, gateway to exploration, and all that) are that it will:

1. Be financially and infrastructurally independent - housed and funded from within the school itself (with help from local volunteers and sponsors). See #Budget.
2. Cultivate and support a local grassroots community around the school that will contribute technology, content, and mentorship to both CFS and the OLPC program at large. See #Local outreach and community involvement.
3. Involve parents, especially through their children doing outreach work. See #The parents.
4. Have older children serve as technical support and project mentors for other students within the school as well as those outside it. See #Students teaching students.
5. Have people of different ages and disciplines from both within the school and around the world together on self-defined, self-designed, self-led projects that have an impact on the world outside the walls of CFS. See #The activities.

How do we plan to do this? Read on.

Contact information

The obligatory blurb about the current draft's author: Mel Chua is an electrical and computer engineer currently working in open-source software development, studying engineering education, and writing in the third person. She has been heavily involved in volunteering for OLPC since Feb. 2007, organizing the first Jam in Boston, running the Summer of Content program, and interning at the OLPC Boston office as part of the Content team despite her hypothetically technical background. Aside from building prosthetic hands, evolutionary robotics simulators, and doing embedded programming for USB peripherals and wireless motion control platforms, Mel has been teaching and developing curriculum for 8 years and has taught and TA'd everything from a math camp on fractals with middle-school students to intro electronics with undergraduate engineering majors. For more details and contact information, read her user page.

Mel is also hoping that some blurbs from other contributors (and other contributions from said contributors) turn up in this section very soon.

About OLPC

Warning: What you are about to see is boilerplate copy-paste designed for formal things like press releases. A far more interesting and up-to-date way of finding out what's going on is reading the OLPC wiki.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The rugged, Linux-based, mesh-networking-enabled, and power-efficient laptops have begun to be deployed to children by schools across the world on the basis of one laptop per child. OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital.

About CFS

Warning: What you are about to see has simply been yoinked from CFS's front page. It's probably a good idea for someone to tweak it and point to where more recent updates can be had.

Cambridge Friends School is a co-educational elementary school (pre-K - grade 8) established in 1961 under the care of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). They have 220 students, 23.3% of whom receive financial assistance. There are two classes per grade, with a maximum class size of 17; the current class size average is 12. See CFS's mission statement.

Proposal

1. Give laptops to students and get them to explore, for credit, topics they are interested in (and give them time and resources to do this).
2. Give teachers laptops and work with them to facilitate and guide, rather than strictly direct, the projects students choose to work on, and to communicate to students, parents, and administrators the exploratory and experimental work of students (it's always a risk to try something new).
3. Give parents ways to more directly see what their children are doing inside the classroom, and opportunities to get involved within their field of expertise.
4. Give students teaching opportunities to mentor younger students as well as (possibly older!) people outside the CFS community.
5. Plan and integrate learning activities into the existing CFS curriculum and into the existing efforts of our partners (work smarter, not harder - leverage existing projects to be more fruitful).
6. Reach out to the community around us and beyond us.
7. See where things go from there...

The laptops

The XO is a low-cost (~$200 at the time of this writing), rugged laptop designed to survive things like 5-foot drops onto concrete, or being left in a bucket of water by a small child in Peru for several hours (both of which have happened; the XO kept working). Aside from its extreme ruggedness, here are a few other salient details:

• Built-in camera and microphone for recording the world around you
• Microphone in port doubles as an analog sensor input - for a few cents, you can probe pressure, temperature, voltage, pH, and generally have a sophisticated science lab that weighs 3 lbs.
• Sunlight-readable reflective screen means that bright light makes it easier, not harder, to read
• Low power consumption, takes a wide range of charger inputs; hook it up to a car battery, a solar panel, an AC wall outlet, a hand crank...
• Can flip over into tablet mode - great for use as an e-book reader.
• Built in mesh network connectivity; kids can share files and collaborate in activities even without a wifi connection available (though it can connect to normal 802.11 wifi as well). Most software activities on the XO are designed for collaboration.
• Open-source - kids can explore and modify the software running on their own computers with the help of a large, friendly, enthusiastic, and in many cases local grassroots group of experienced programmers.

For more details, see the Hardware specification. If no XOs are available before the pilot's start date (Fall 2008 or Spring 2009 - one of the semesters of the 2008-2009 academic year) other low-cost laptops may be substituted.

The students

We'd propose giving the XOs to all students in the 1st and 6th grades for the pilot year. It seems like these are commmon "transition years," ages at which students are likely to be new to the school, and having the support of an older child (or a younger child to mentor) would be a beneficial relationship especially around this time.

Schedule

This schedule is a strawman.

Spring 2008: Community development

• Gather interest and support pledges from the OLPC Boston community
• Work with the Olin repair center to set up a technical support plan
• Get interested teachers and parents informed of how they can contribute
• Fundraising for supplies (if needed)

Summer 2008: Setup and training

• Have the OLPC Boston community develop software and activities in response to the curricular requests of the teachers
• Set up connectivity and charging infrastructures in the relevant classrooms
• Invite teachers to workshops to learn about the program; connect them with teachers from other pilot schools and countries so they can share ideas
• Find someone to document the project's progress throughout the year

Fall 2008: Launch and initial activities

• Distribute laptops
• Start!
• Schedule weekly (for the first month) and biweekly (after the first month) visits and activities with the local OLPC community to explore different ways the XO can be integrated into the curriculum

Spring 2009: Outreach and giving back

• Host an open house for parents - but also local scientists, engineers, educators, etc. - to see the children present the work they've done
• Mentor other area pilot schools?
• Papers? Conferences?

Equipment needed

XO laptops

Note: I'm making up these numbers - folks from CFS, do you have more accurate counts on how many of these you'll need?

• 1 laptop per child in participating classrooms (~15 students x 4 classrooms = 60 laptops)
• 1 laptop per teacher in participating classrooms (4 laptops)
• 1 laptop each for supporting teachers and administrators... (5 laptops)
  • music teacher
  • science teacher
  • math teacher
  • art teacher
  • technology coordinator
• 5 extra laptops for emergency repairs, community events, and short-term loans to external volunteers

Total: 74 laptops

Power adapters

Power adapters use the normal 120VAC from wall outlets, which are readily available throughout the CFS campus. We'll need to get some power strips and extension cords for children to all be able to plug in at once, but these are easily obtained from local hardware stores at affordable prices.

Wifi network

The CFS campus already has wireless internet access. Whether the coverage and bandwidth are sufficient for an XO pilot needs more investigation. This may necessitate the purchase of an extra wireless router or two, but they are easily obtained from local computer stores at not unreasonably exorbitant prices.

School server

The XS school server will not be an initial vital component of the CFS pilot in terms of having a standalone desktop/server in every participating classroom running the official XS software release. (It's possible that this could be a local grassroots group project; a team of volunteer Boston-area developers are already implementing an XS server in their spare time.)

However, there will be a storage repository of some sort specifically dedicated to backing up the CFS XOs (this could easily be done with a single desktop on campus with several large hard drives in a RAID array, or with off-site hosting) as well as an "external portfolio" website where students and teachers can upload and host their work. When possible, students and their collaborators will host their work in existing knowledge communities such as Curriki, WikiEducator, Wikipedia, Launchpad, and so on in order to make their contributions immediately part of a global collaboration and a larger body of knowledge.