Inside the OLPC XO: Software

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In Peter Norton manner

Goals

• One Laptop Per Child, of course

Our goal: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.

Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonweal, because it lacks the tools to do so.

It is time to rethink this equation.

• Educational software based on Constructivism, that is, on collaborative discovery.
• No proprietary software
• Free textbooks and content

XO Linux

See also

• Installing Debian as an upgrade Actually as a dual-boot.
• Software_components#Operating_system

Installed version

• Linux kernel 2.6.22. Current stable version is 2.6.23.8.
• Red Hat Fedora Rawhide 7 Current release is version 8.

Sugar

• Activity tutorial
• Category:Installing Sugar
• Category:Sugar

Computer languages

• FORTH for Open Firmware
• Python in Pippy and activities
• Turtle Art turtle graphics
• Squeak Smalltalk in Etoys
• CSound in TamTam
• Javascript
• Gnash Free implementation of Adobe Flash

Human languages

• Writing systems: keyboard layouts, input method editors, rendering, printing
• Localization
• Language learning

Activities

See also Software_components#Applications.

In current build

• Text Chat Activity, instant messenger
• Browse Activity (based on Mozilla Gecko Xulrunner, the Firefox Web engine)
• Write Activity (based on AbiWord)
• Record Activity still and video camera
• Paint Activity
• TamTamJam Activity Collaborative music
• Etoys Activity Smalltalk
• TurtleArt Activity Logo subset
• Pippy Activity Python examples
• Calculator Activity Plain, scientific, elementary financial. No RPN. See also Physics_Calculator.
• Measure Activity Data cquisition and display
• Measure_/_Oscilloscope
• TamTamEdit Activity MIDI editor
• TamTamSynthLab Activity Instrument creation
• Memorize Activity Game
• Connect Activity Game
• TamTamMini Activity Music
• RSS News Reader Activity
• Journal Activity

In development

• MikMik Activity Wiki with WYSIWIG editing
• Spreadsheet Activity
• Develop Activity, an activity editor
• Debugger Activity
• Shell Activity
• Remote Desktop Activity
• Other game activities
• OLPCities, a virtual world programming environment
• FACIL, a webpage editor developed to be used by children. (In English at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/EASE)
• Musical Editor, a music composition toolkit
• Drawing Workshop, a shared graphics space
• Tux Paint, a paint program with extreme ease-of-use
• BlockParty, a Tetris-like game that exploits the mesh
• A simple document viewer based upon evince (including the ability to view PDF);
• Multimedia playback using gstreamer (the Real Networks Helix™ platform has been ported to the laptop and is available for download but is not part of the base distribution)

More to come.

Console

• Press Ctl-Alt-F1 to access bash command line.
• Log in as root (no password).
• Press Alt-F3 to return to Sugar.

See also Terminal.

Desktop

Gnome on Live CD

Using the XO in education

Collaboration

All activities share a common data store accessible through the Journal. Most activities, including reading, writing, recording, and browsing, allow for collaboration through the network, child-to-child and teacher-to-child.

See Activity sharing and Collaboration Tutorial.

See also

• Programming for Children
• Programming with Children
• Constructivism
• Educational Software

Discovery

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
--Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

External References

• Muska Mosston, Teaching from Command to Discovery
• Georg Polya, How to Solve It
• John Holt, How Children Learn
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Mozart Assassiné"