University program

Support and enthusiasm from student communities has been immense for OLPC and is greatly appreciated. This is the page for you if you are interested in getting involved, want to learn about other student communities or want to share your story.

How to Use this Page

this is a wiki page which allows you to edit or add information. We do this because we want to hear from you! If you have a comment, feel free to leave it on the discussion page. But if you want to add your group to our growing university list or share your story go ahead and add it in! Just hit edit on the tab menu above.

Ways to Participate

1. Contributor's Program

For those who are tech-savvy we encourage you to participate in our Contributor's program. Through this program you are able to request an XO laptop for software development. Please visit: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Developers_Program

2. Give One, Get Program

This is a very exciting time for OLPC because we are currently holding our second Give One, Get One program. The Give One, Get One program is a chance for you to donate an XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and to purchase an XO laptop for yourself. This allows OLPC to deploy thousands of laptops to our partner countries. Ethiopia, Mongolia and Rwanda. Last year we were able to provide over 100,000 kids in Haiti, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Rwanda with their own laptops. While the cost for just giving an XO: $199, and the cost for giving and getting: $399, is a high price for a college student, many have fundraised among their family, peers and friends to make this happen. For more information please visit: www.laptop.org/xo

3. Change the World Program

The Change the World Program allows the public, for the first time ever, the chance to send laptops to the country or classroom of their choice. With a donation of 100 or more XO laptops, any group can give children in a specific place the chance to learn, share, dream and connect to each other and to the world. For more information please visit: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Change_the_world Again, many groups have fundraised to deliver laptops to a classroom/school in their community.

4. Grassroots Community

OLPC has a tremendous grassroots network and college-aged students make up a large majority of this community. Check out some of the current college grassroots groups and learn about all the great promotion they have done for OLPC here: "http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_program" aka look below!

Many in our grassroots community have developed groups that advocate for laptops in a particular country region, and active diaspora communities have been pivotal in bringing the XO laptops to many countries. You can also join the grassroots mailing list: grassroots@lists.laptop.org

5. Create a University Chapter

The process of forming a University chapter is very informal. University chapters are really just good excuses to get groups of interesting people together to do interesting things... that happen to be related to OLPC. Click on this link for some suggestions on how to start your chapter: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forming_a_chapter

6. Fundraise

You can always raise money for the OLPC Foundation, which is a great help! You can do that by sending a check to:

OLPC Foundation One Cambridge Center, 10th Fl. Cambridge, MA 02142

7. Request a visit to your school for the OLPC demo team

If you have an event at your school and would like to put OLPC on the agenda, please let our team here know by emailing: students@laptop.org

Date/Time

Location

Expected Number of Attendees

Is there Internet Access

We will respond to your email within a few days to let you know if an OLPC demo team can attend the event.

If you are thinking of coordinating a larger OLPC-specific event and would like a speaker please include that in the request.

8. Get your own XO for demos

Lastly, if you have a well-organized group that would like to perform your own demos or feel that having an XO would greatly enhance your efforts, please send a request to students@laptop.org, stating:

Your Group/Background

What you intend to do with the XO

Shipping Information (including phone number)

9. If at any point during your fundraising, promotion, etc. you would like to share your stories or reach out to other University groups (who could also help with demos!) please email our mailing list: university-chapters@lists.laptop.org

Benefits

• An "XO lab in a box" - some number of spots (3? 5?) in the developers' program so the students can have machines to play/experiment with (note: not sure if this is possible yet)
• Connections, networking, etc. with others in the OLPC community (not that you can't do that without a university chapter, but this lowers the activation energy for people to join in)
• Announcements about research, internship, etc. opportunities for OLPC work
• A good excuse to work on OLPC for credit :-)
• Your ideas here - what else would you like to see?

Activities

• Participate in the Classrooms for Free Culture program
• Run Jams at your school
• Take on OLPC projects as class projects/assignments for CS, engineering, education, history, language, etc. classes - see Andy Barry's X(I/O)_Reconfigurable_Gaming_Input_Device, Arjun's Measure project ideas for some examples
• Serve as mentors for younger students making content, software, hardware, etc

These are just for starters - add your own!

Engineering

build a peripheral, write a program, test the wireless network, build a human-powered charger, do environmental impact testing, build engineering curricula for middle-schoolers in the developing world...

Language

Translate a couple paragraphs of a childrens' book, help students in Peru and Kenya find a way to pen-pal, work on language-learning software, test out the resources we have by learning a new language with them yourself!

Journalism

Help kids start and grow local newspapers and magazines, blogs and podcasts, so that "world news" really includes the whole world - a video of a calf being born in Mexico, a storekeeper's commentary on economics in Thailand, etc.

Business

Mentor fledgling entrepreneurs (are local moms starting repair shops to help kids who accidentally break their things? does a teenager in Guatemala want to start a business selling his mom's textiles online?), come up with a program to teach kids and their parents about economics, Help nonprofits and grassroots groups start up, cultivate local businesses producing accessories and services for the laptop, find ways to market and publicize it within a country.

Law

How do you license material, or persuade others to release their materials under open licenses or in the public domain so that the children are free to use, share, remix, etc. it? How do you teach children about their intellectual property rights and the licensing of the things they themselves create?

Politics

Can you help the citizens of a country get their ministry of education to join the program? The laptops are distributed through a nation's public education system, so government buy-in is a prerequisite.

Education

What can teachers do with these new things in their classroom? How do you learn how to learn with computers if you've never seen one before?

And more

If you're taking a Medieval English Lit class, write a chapter in a history textbook. Fly to Nepal in the summer to help kids come up with ways to use their computers. Make art for educational computer games, write documentation, help kids use the built-in camera to shoot movies of life in their hometown, share the music you compose with them, experiment with using simple sensor peripherals, software, and resources to monitor the environment, perform basic medical diagnosis (one peripheral in the making is a microscope), educate people about public health, make laptops usable by children with disabilities...

Schools

Below is a list of OLPC chapters at universities across the globe. Check out their stories and please feel free to add your own. We want to hear about your great work and all you have achieved.

University of Lincoln (UK)

• Cornelia Boldyreff

University of Lincoln, Department of Computing and Informatics Chapter

This chapter is associated with the Lincolnshire Branch of the British Computer Society and located within the computing department at Lincoln. We are currently working on a summer research project, CODEX, to develop resources to support students within DCI who wish to undertake project work developing software for the XO laptop.

Olin College (USA)

• Nikki Lee

Olin university chapter

Olin is an engineering college, and also has large proportion of students interested in appropriate technology, education, sustainability, and developing nations (and various combinations of the three). Nearly all classes are project-based; there have been attempts by professors to find community service projects for their students to do for credit, but despite interested professors and students, good projects are hard to come by (potential need to fulfill here!) Olin has community service hours on Friday afternoons where no classes are scheduled so that students can volunteer on a project of their choice. OLPC would probably be a popular one. There is an active group of Linux users who occasionally run installfests. Professors have been enthusiastic about allowing Olin students to do OLPC-related things as schoolwork or for-credit projects, and have even pitched in on projects themselves.

Panjab University (India)

• Gaurav Chachra

The OLPC India Student Chapter was formed on 5th February 2008 at Panjab University, India after a presentation on OLPC at a seminar among an audience of about 100 people. The OLPC project was admired by the audience and many of them joined the student chapter with commitment to bring OLPC to India. By a step by step procedure, OLPC India Student Chapter plans to spread awareness about OLPC in India, particularly in education community, i.e. Universities, colleges, schools, and Education Experts. It is hoped that it ultimately will lead to India approving OLPC project.

Yorktown High School (USA)

• FFM
• Matthew Gallagher
• Thomas Doggette

Yorktown High School chapter

YHS has 3 XOs in its possession. They are currently working on GASP, and are interested in starting up a repair center.

Northwestern University (USA)

• James Levy

Northwestern has world-class engineering and management programs, as well as the Medill School of Journalism. NU also has a very strong activism environment. OLPC would likely get interest from a variety of student groups and new volunteers eager to achieve greater awareness and help OLPC, run Jams, and have major-specific initiatives.

Oregon State University (USA)

• Tim Budd

OSU has an active group of students working on OLPC projects. The port of the AbiWord wordprocessor used by the OLPC was made by an OSU student. Other students are working on the Helix media activity. Professor Budd teaches a course on open source development, and would like to get more students involved in projects for the OLPC.

Duke University (USA)

• Alex Keybl, John Peña
• OLPC@Duke
• Duke University Chapter

Duke University, sometimes referred to as a "Southern Ivy", has a range of strong programs that includes everything from engineering to computer science and business. Hoping to focus these skills on a philanthropic project, we are planning on creating an interdisciplinary effort to raise funds for OLPC, work with the community, raise awareness of the organization, and actually develop software/hardware for the XO laptop.

Pontificia Universidad Catolica (Peru)

• Lglira

Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú(PUCP) is a top-quality private education institution. There are currently 16,000 students who pursue 43 different specialties (undergraduate and graduate) in 9 faculties (Science, Engineering, Education, Business, Social Science, Humanities) . The campus also features a wireless high-speed internet connection and Internet2 available to all members of the PUCP community.

E-Quipu is a special program to support students groups and there are many chapters of professional and international organizations. Cultura Libre is the FreeCulture.org chapter at PUCP. Other student chapters: IEEE, ACM, AIESEC, ASME, ACI.

Paola Lira from Cultura Libre will be visiting MIT from July 11 to August 11, 2008.

South East European University (SEEU)(Tetovo - Macedonia)

• ALIU

http://www.seeu.edu.mk SEEU is a contemporary, young, educational institution, established in 2001, based on the goodwill of ‘friends of higher education’. SEEU is a university with five faculties, featuring quality undergraduate and postgraduate programmes within the socio-economic disciplines, business and public administration, law, communication sciences and technologies and teacher training. All programmes offered by the University are modular and follow the pattern of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) conform the Bologna Agreement. This gives students the flexibility to specialize or take a more broadly-based programme.

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia)

Offray Luna

We have some initial experience in the building of learners networks and "communities of discourse" inside one class (Introduction to Informatics) as as way to "imitate" the communities of practice of Free Culture/Software/Content and in the process we produce free content and software (this is an experience with first semester students, so the software is not much advanced --small games, interactive books in Squeak-- and is used as a "probe of concept" of their own learning process). All the process is documented in Eduwiki (www.eduwiki.info), which, at this stage is a little messy, but it works as an organic memory for the class and new students improve it every semester. We need now to work on extended and sustained bridges with the Free Software/Content community, but the main problem is that there is still not a Spanish speaking community of practice for teaching/learning at that grade in the tools we use, so we're trying to build a Spanish Squeakers community for young people in contrast with English speaking communities for children or young programmers. Another problem at this moment is the lack of comprehensive Spanish documentation on the subjects we try. We can find plenty open content documentation in the form of small tuturials and we produce also new content in the classroom experience, but this can be as comprehensive as a textbook, so we're planning the liberation of excellent textbooks as the Stephane Ducasse's "Squeak: Learn programming with robots" under an open content license

Another place where we have been working is in differential calculus and linear algebra with computational mathematics using TeXmacs/Yacas/Maxima as the principal free software tools to produce free content. The open content at this moment are solutions of text book problems and exercises, but there is no problem on comprehensive free content mathematical books to be translated/changed or even created from the scratch on these matters as there are on themes related with new technologies (as Squeak, for example).

About the previous issues I have being planed some projects for the summer of content that I would link when they're better structured.

University of Salford (UK)

Frances Bell [1]

We are forming a chapter at Salford based on content development with a group of home and international students. Computer science colleagues are also interested so we may contribute code too. We need to do much more research into OLPC.

Illinois Math and Science Academy (USA)

• April-Hope Wareham and Kevin Crews

IMSA Chapter Page

We are the first high school chapter of OLPC, started in September 2007. We are currently working on a student inquiry project and an intersession (weeklong study between first and second semester) with OLPC. More soon to come about us, and feel free to email us any questions!

Moraine Valley Community College

See MVCC for more information.

Bradley University (USA)

• Chris Miller

This is a newly forming student chapter at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Our work will hopefully include XO software and hardware development, content creation, and fundraising. More to come as the school year begins...

Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

• Nirav Patel

Student Technology Outreach is a student organization at CMU that has started an Activity development project.