OLPC software task list

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 One Laptop per Child

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Introduction

OLPC will need to establish software work groups as general framework to enable the successful deployment and use of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. Most of these work groups will have national counterparts that may vary in how they choose to prepare for and manage the program in order to take advantage of local strengths, skills, resources, culture, and strategic directions.

There is some natural overlap of workgroup missions so naturally they will have to remain coordinated. A coordinating body that includes representatives from each workgroup should meet on a regular basis. OLPC is unique. Adoption of universal access to connected computers for education presents opportunities previously virtually impossible. Serious thinking and creativity can bring widespread social benefits. By being open to innovative ways of thinking combined with an understanding of local conditions, the workgroups can contribute mightily to OLPC success.

The critical success factors include creating:

• High quality educational examples of OLPC use
• Conditions for the development of people and ideas
• Mechanisms for the spread of good ideas and tools

Fostering the development of the early adopters and helping their ideas and examples to spread are key. As OLPC is a multi-national effort, each nation does not have to invent everything for itself. They can and should learn from each other. The technology itself facilitates the spread of the ideas and examples. There also will be the workgroup meeting at MIT in March, 2006 to help facilitate this process.

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A computer is only as useful as the software that runs on it. The OLPC will come with certain general purpose software available (e.g. browser, word processing, utilities, etc.). There also will be several types of software for learning that take specific advantage of computers (e.g. LOGO, Squeak, Scratch, etc.). A major decision was to base the OLPC on open source software. This provides countries with the freedom to decide for themselves what to place on the machines.

The task of the software workgroups is to determine what principles to follow and what mechanisms to put in place to provide widespread access to high quality educational and general software for children and their families. The taskforce also needs to analyze and make plans for any needed localization. Rather than re-invent the wheel, the workgroups can take a strategic view and adopt high quality software developed elsewhere, localize at the level required (whether for language, local content, or local culture), and develop new software to fill in the gaps. In this way overall costs can be diminished.

Moreover, the software workgroups can take a strategic view towards industrial development by fostering a positive climate for local developers to create new software, tools, and content for digital media. Software that truly facilitates learning and that utilizes the best of digital, computational environments (that is, that they are expressive, dynamic, multi-modal, collaborative, visual). This workgroup will need to coordinate extensively with all the other workgroups as the software is a key component towards the success of every group. The software group also can study how to best use the emerging connected computational infrastructure to further other social goals.

OLPC Software Task List

At its most basic, we need: an operating system; a web browser; an eBook reader; and some other base-level utilties, such as audio recording and playback, video playback, word processing, tools for drawing, etc.

With 500 MB of flash memory, and 128 MB of RAM, the $100 laptop will not be tied to a specific set of software or content. It will have the flexibility to change with the requirements of the student. Individuals will inevitably find individualized uses; certainly local, regional, and national requirements will drive much of the base configuration.

Indeed, the faster OLPC moves from designing the OS to adding applications and localization, the better for everyone.

OLPC Fantasy Software Teams

Kernel

The responsibilities include base device support, power management, memory and OOM management, flash file system, Athleros driver, X EXA device driver, distributed file system (e.g. Coda).

Who: Jim Gettys, David Woodhouse (JFFSn), Macello Tosatti (general help), Mauricio Lin & Fabritio Sampsa (Nokia, OOM), X driver (AMD & Tungsten Graphics (?)), Satya (?) & people to be hired.

Base System Environment

The responsibilities include derivative distribution repackaging, base libraries, "standard" out of the box applications and desktop environment (e..g. window management, application launcher, file browser, system configuration). Internationalization and localization technology, accessibility technology all belong here. Mesh networking power aware networking belongs here.

Who: Jim Gettys, Mako Hill, Dan Williams, David Zeuthen, Marco Gritti, Phil Blundel (?), Owen Taylor, Mathew Allum(?)

Suggestion: The Base System should be the same for all laptops and do not change very often. This would be the OLPC API. The benefit is that students can just download and use an OLPC software (doesn't matter if it's a brazilian student getting a chinese program). Also, developers can adjust their software to use the standard OLPC libraries avoiding library duplication, reducing application size and memory usage.

Python development

The target for application developers will be the OLPC Python Environment. This is composed of the Python language, GTK GUI and GECKO HTML engine. Together they are referred to as Sugar.

Network Environment

The responsibilities include software services such as backup, software distribution, email, web services, VOIP, IM, printing, etc. Additionally, services for schools themselves belong in this group (e.g. administrative software). There are also non-software-related issues this team will confront, such as regarding regulatory regimes, spectrum availability, use of "universal access" funds, carrier participation, etc.

Who: Michail Bletsas, Dave Reed, Demi Getschko

Localization and Universal Access

The responsibilities include fonts that will provide an acceptable coverage for the required languages, translation of the software (user-interface and help files), writing support (input methods), creation of locales, etc. The system must fully use Unicode (UTF-8) instead of legacy 8-bit encodings.

Educational Software

The responsibilities of this group include selecting suitable educational software, (with an understanding of memory consumption of the software). Ebook and book authoring technology belongs here. Other issues include teacher preparation, migration of exisiting content, a framework for new content development, school-server technologies, a "Kids Corps" for maintenance.

Who: Walter Bender, David Cavallo, Seymour Papert, Brian Smith, Alan Kay, K12LTSP(?), Mitchel Resnick, Roseli de Deus Lopes

Touch Typing educational software to get kids used to using the keyboard QWERTY, or AZERTY or whatever, the faster you can type the faster you can use a computer. And this will be a nice introduction to a tool many of them may be scared of? Random typing speed tests but whatever solution you come up with it needs to be better than anything that is available for free currently.

A small collection of existing free "touch typing tutor" applications from the net.sources and comp.sources.unix archives is at [1]. All are for character terminals (one's in BASIC!), but the word lists and progression from easy to hard may be extractable into a graphical one. These are presented as they came over the Usenet -- copyright clearance may be required.

There is also a need for basic tools for programming and authoring. [LOGO], OpenOffice, Dia, TuxPaint, etc. all should be considered.

However, let's keep in mind that there is a difference between Edutainment and and Playful Learning. And we want Playful Learning instead of Edutainment. Also, we don't want kids to be punished by rewards.

Educational Competitive Games Software

This section was entitled Educational Games Software until 2006-05-01. The new title may be more appropriate, yet readers may like to be aware that comments made before that date were made when the original title was in place.

I believe that the best way to educate with these tools will be the use of educational games, with the following characteristics: -a) Competitive game, among 4 to 8 youngsters teams, to promote the human touch, teamwork, help among peers, and even auto-teaching groups. -b) EVERY team member might receive questions from the rival team so nobody can just "navigate" in a team of smart kids. -c) Answers must encourage real world virtues, being PRECISE (Quality) and FAST (Productivity). -d) To stimulate interest, teams will earn points that can be traded, later on, for objects donated by sports and entretaining stars (like a football signed by the Superbowl players or Madonna´s objects signed by her, or a President´s Dinner). Who: Dagoberto G. Flores-Lozano, AGS, MEX

Suggestion: Touch Typing games to get kids used to using the keyboard QWERTY, AZERTY or whatever, the faster you can type the faster you can use a computer.

Question: Do ALL educational games need to be competitive? Is there a place for cooperative games where everybody is part of the winning team if the game is completed? William Overington 1948 GMT 23 March 2006

Question: Why is it that so many participation events are competitions (where entrants compete AGAINST each other) and are of the format where there is only one or a few prizewinners? William Overington 1953 GMT 23 March 2006

Answer: The best way to promoting competitivity is through competition. What I am proposing is a cooperative game as it is played between 4 to 8 member teams, in a pattern used by Scouts (Boy/Girl Scouts) for some time. Besides, games become a lot more interesting when it is present. One of the best characteristics of modern organizations is COMPETITIVITY, and such trend, developed by the ISO-9000:2000 is made up of QUALITY (doing things right THE FIRST TIME, and satisfying client needs), PRODUCTIVITY (doing more with less time & resources), SERVICE (treating clients with Education), and IMAGE (creating mental awareness of the organization in the objective market) Life is full of competittion for jobs & many things. And Overington is right, the winners should be the TEAMS, not specific individuals... --Dagoflores 00:47, 2 April 2006 (EST)

On 2006-05-01 0418Z the comment "And Overington is right, the winners should be the TEAMS, not specific individuals." was added.

It is always nice when someone agrees with me, yet, actually, I was not saying that. I was wondering why an educational game should be in the format of teams with one team as "the winning team" or "the winners" and thus the other one or more teams not being winners, but losers. In a game such as football there is no way that everyone can be a winner in terms of the result of the game, though for professional footballers they all win in the sense that they all get paid for taking part. If the competitiveness is taken out of the game, there is nothing left. Yet in an educational game, if one takes out competitiveness, there is still the learning left. Everyone is part of one team and if the educational game is devised in such a way that everyone learns by playing the game as one team then everyone is part of the winning team. It just seems to me that there is no need for the concept of one team beating the other team to be part of an educational culture. Having said that I suppose that I need to produce an educational game where everybody is part of the winning team. How about an educational game where the team (that is, one team consisting of all of the people present) has to produce correct answers to a number of long multiplication sums of two numbers each of four digits multiplied together. The time taken is noted and the game is played on several days. The students could try to beat their previous time. If the number of such multiplications is, say, four times the number of students in the team, then I wonder what would happen in that some students could be much faster at producing the results than would be others. It is true that life is full of competition for jobs and other things. Yet there are also situations where people in a society try to arrange things so that everyone gets something, such as people on higher incomes contributing more in taxes, often at a higher rate of taxation so that a person on a higher income pays a greater percentage of his or her income in taxes as well as more in actual money. However, that is just my own view and it may be a minority view, maybe in a minority of one.

William Overington

2006-05-01 0901Z

The thing with losing is that you will try to do better next time. As such there is a value to losing as long as it does not happen all the time. If there are enough players you can always win from a less experienced player or team. I see the value of competition because it is a very strong motivator to do better next time and it boosts the self esteem if you or your team wins. The thing with computer games is that there is a strong difference between PvP (Player vs. Player) or PvE (Player vs. Environment). A player can train (alone or in teams) against a virtual oponent until he/she feel confident to compete with other humans. Are there any other motivations that are strong enough to serve educational needs other then competition? I believe that any game that can show progress in self development is good for the OLPC project.

Hans Speijer 2006-05-25

Community Formation

OLPC needs to foster communications between communities: the project must be a community of communities to scale. OLPC server infrastructure is being established to support these roles, which includes email, bugzilla, wiki, project hosting, SCM systems, etc.

I have been integrating a dozen open-source software projects over the last three years and I think I have a solid framework for these comunities to be built upon, take a look http://www.ourgateway.org

I would love to be a part of this effort.

Regards, Peter O'Reilly p144@yahoo.com

Linux community engagement

Engaging the Linux community overall is very important. Memory consumption is an issue in much open source software, due to sloppy programming. We should be providing examples of best practice: the more that these practices are internalized into general open source community, the better.

(Reader's Contribution) PuppyLinux is an active member of the Linux community that so far has shown confidence in performing well despite the resource constraints of the OLPC machine. Its creator and lead developer is willing to customize (and further reduce its small size of 62 MB) for the OLPC: Barry Kauler, bkauler at goosee dot com.

Networking community engagement

The global connectivity of tens of thousands, growing to of order a million schools is a major challenge of network logistics. We must help spark the involvement of networking people all over the world to successfully scale to this level.

The built-in mesh networking capability of the OLPC provides new means for local networks. For these networks to connect to the whole internet and worldwide web, plans must be made to enable high-bandwidth access. The task of the Networks workgroup is to plan for universal access to high bandwidth connectivity over time. The idea is to:

• set up optimal global and local networking
• use the network for upgrading and maintaining the system
• create new platforms and services for collaboration
• use the network for ongoing teacher development
• use the network for student peer-to-peer learning opportunities, creating communities of learners and communities of practice
• development and distribution of traditional and newly enabled digital content
• create a sustainable basis for continuous educational improvement

National situations will vary depending upon a variety of factors, including existing levels of development, geography, existing presence of cable and satellite access, and so on. This not only looks downstream at the OLPC communities, but also upstream towards government policies regarding bandwidth, frequencies, and so on.

The Networks workgroup will collaborate closely with the education workgroup so that deployment of the laptops has optimal connectivity possibilities. While productive use of the laptop does not require outside connectivity, obviously connectivity enhances its value. It is possible that a mixed-mode approach will be necessary at least in the short term. That is, providing high bandwidth connectivity to all areas immediately may not be feasible. Yet this should not prevent distribution to areas that cannot connect as they may present some of the more pressing educational needs. The workgroup should strive to enable all areas to do as much as possible. This may require local adaptations to add value through providing periodic value to the OLPC mesh networks via a new store-and-forward capability.

In addition to global access, it is essential that the workgroup prepare a dissemination plan for software distribution, upgrades, and maintenance. It is also essential to work with the education workgroup to develop and localize new collaborative environments for educational, technical, and social purposes.

An Independent Educational Network using Data/Power lines communication?

In order to avoid the mess of bandwidth use by: SPAM, mp3, pornography, etc.

I propose to use Independent Educational Network, using data transmisssion over Power lines which is coming up as a feasible technology. --Dagoflores 01:17, 1 April 2006 (EST)

Eductional community engagement

Since OLPC is an educational project, educational community engagement is fundamental. The overall objective is to maximize the potential of one-to-one access to connected computers to dramatically improve education for all. The task of the Education workgroup is to comprehensively prepare for the successful deployment of the laptops by creating an evolving educational action plan to take advantage of the learning activities that will definitely emerge.

The education plan should cover all levels, from basic improvement through access to computers and connectivity, on through dramatic improvement by enabling the development of collaborative clusters of expertise. The basic level includes ensuring the localization of existing content to be accessible in local language on the OLPC. This will enable the basic e-book functionality. However, we emphasize the need for the development of new content that takes advantage of the immersive presence of computers to facilitate learning of important material that is difficult to comprehend without computational technology. In particular, this implies using the computer as a creative, constructive, collaborative device. We also emphasize the need to plan for on-going teacher and educator development.

Deployment

Unless the country will immediately supply laptops for every child, decisions must be made about how to roll out the computers until the goal of one laptop per child is reached. The immersive nature of one-to-one computing is essential to making dramatic improvement in education. Therefore, we strongly recommend distributing computers on a one-to-one basis throughout an entire region, and not to sprinkle them in low density throughout the country.

Choosing the order of districts for receiving the laptops is not an easy decision. It is our experience that the greatest gains can be made when the initial sites set strong exemplars for use. This is possible through selection for high likelihood of good educational practice with computers as well as by addressing critical social needs. One tactic that has worked well is to invite local communities to propose what they will contribute in order to be chosen. This does not imply funds; rather it often is support by parents, or the offer to give teachers time and support to learn how to successfully use the computers, or plans for innovation in education enabled by the computers.

Teacher Development

The more teachers become comfortable with using computers, the better they will be able to function. While this process takes time, experience has demonstrated that it is possible.

Digital Content

It is strongly advisable to begin to develop new content that takes advantage of the widespread presence of computers. Rather than just re-hosting existing content on the computers, new content and new approaches are possible. It has been our experience that certain limitations in the learning environment that seemed intractable can be ameliorated not just through new methodological approaches, but also through new content enabled by the technology.

Copyright Problems

The OLPC community, and the country educational bureacracies, will need to "cut out the middleman" in procuring textbooks for OLPC. That is, we or they should contract directly with textbook authors to write textbooks for a one-time fee, publishing the textbooks under a free (CC-ShareAlike or GNU FDL) license. Older, existing textbooks will not be usable, even if scanned in, unless their copyrights can be purchased. The author and editor can be paid what they would usually be paid by an educational publisher.

While new interactive teaching programs should also be developed in parallel, the process of buying static textbooks will be the fastest path to books that are usable on the OLPC by the very first kids to get them. This process should start immediately. There's no need to wait for hardware. The bulk of the work can be delivered in plain text. Markup (e.g. OpenDocument or HTML) will only be needed to incorporate graphics -- and that markup can be inserted later, once the book-viewer software's specs have settled.

It will take qualified authors and editors a year to write a good textbook, so it's time to get started today. Most such textbooks can be translated into a variety of languages, speeding up the process for subsequent languages (though these will still require final editing by an expert in the subject and in the language). But we don't even know yet what grade the first kids will be attending (high school? elementary?), or what subjects will be included in their course of study. As soon as these things are pinned down (or guessed well), the process of finding qualified and available authors and editors can begin.

If we don't watch out, textbooks will end up on the cricital path, slowing down hardware distribution. (And if hardware isn't on the critical path, then we should wait for better hardware before producing a million of these!)

I am worried at the fact that in Mexico, the content of the "Free Grammar Textbooks", for example is not available over Internet because of "Copyright reasons". Also an recent development in Educational Material called the "ENCICLOMEDIA" is not available for Private Schools, for the "same reason"; if the greedy friends of governments that develop Educational Material, behave like that and try to extract money from the PUBLIC FUNDED developed material, I think is unfair... Country governments should warranty that will NOT HAPPEN --Dagoflores 03:13, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Collaboration

The OLPC enables new, more customized environments for learning. New communities of learners can be enabled because every child will have a laptop and the laptops will have connectivity. The borders of the classroom walls are removed and learners can get information, work with others, pursue their interests and passions, and work in ways previously not possible. How to support this, what tools are needed, how to re-arrange the curriculum, are all areas for serious study.

Strategic Research

OLPC is new. Very little experience exists regarding how to use one laptop per child effectively. There is virtually no experience with this in developing countries. Thus, it is highly recommended that an ongoing panel of thinkers study, reflect, discuss, and propose based upon what is working, what needs improvement, and what new possibilities are enabled. It is also highly recommended that this group be broad-based, not limited only to those in the education field. We propose including other intellectuals, artists, civic leaders in order to provide a diversity of experience and expertise.