User:Mchua

Who are you?

Mel Chua, full-time OLPC volunteer and itinerant Boston-area hack of all trades. Electrical and computer engineer by training, educator by passion, artist by hobby, journalist by accident, everything else out of sheer curiosity. Pressed for a short job description, I would say that I engineer educations.

Reaching Mel

I am often around the OLPC office at least every few days. Leaving a message on my talk page or sending me an email (my first name at melchua dot com) is the best way to reach me 99% of the time. I usually respond within 48 hours. If you need an immediate response, text my phone at 847.970.8484.

Note that leaving me a voicemail message is the slowest of them all; I have to get a friend to transcribe my voicemail (I'm hearing-impaired and lipread) so it usually takes about a week for me to reply to those!

About me

I keep a blog of entropic thought at http://www.mellory.blogspot.com I program (primarily in C, C++ and Python, but can pick up other languages), build simple computer peripherals (primarily using PIC microcontrollers, though I'm looking to branch into other platforms), and am learning web programming and interface design. Feel free to grab me if you think I'll be helpful for a task.

What... is your quest: To make a world where makers make themselves. (I need to come up with a more elegant wording of this.) Eventually I want to get two PhD's, one in engineering and one in education, and become a professor teaching and researching at the (currently shaky and fledgling) union of the two disciplines. I am currently preparing for a research trip involving an around-the-world plane ticket and visits to engineering colleges around the world to see how engineers are taught in different parts of the planet.

What... is your favorite color: Yellow.

Drugs of choice: Python, soy milk, and TAing intro engineering classes. Discussions on the future of education and learning and where technology falls into this. I have fairly radical ideas about classroom structure (my preference: none), information distribution (my preference: everything is freely world-readable and world-writable) and student evaluation (my preference: feedback yes, grades no), but these ideas are still quite open and under formation and I love talking to people about these and related topics.

I am Chinese and my family is from the Philippines. I was the first person in my extended family to grow up and be schooled outside the developing world, and the first to develop hardware, software, and participate in internet communities. I grew up as a "disabled" kid with a hearing loss severe enough to warrant a host of technological aids, special classes, and a full-time sign language interpreter. This has shaped many of my attitudes towards education, access, technology, globalization, and development.

Projects

Current

• Jams

• Working on resources and a framework for future content OLPC Jams of different types. In particular, I am in the middle of writing the How To Run A Jam cookbook.
• Setting up the parallel Curriculum Jams that are slated to run this fall - I'll be attending Curriculum Jam Manila. Contact me if you're interested in running or participating in a Jam in your area, especially if you'll be in Manila in the fall.

• Internships

• Developing the Summer of Content program, starting with coordination of the Summer of Content 2007 round, currently ongoing.
• Serving as one of the OLPC project mentors for the Summer of Content 2007. If you'd like to work with me, drop me a line via email or my talk page.

• Testing

• Starting Review Squads of young testers and teachers to give feedback on our content. Now recruiting Squad Members and Squad Leaders!

Potential

These are some ideas I had kicking around that I would like to tinker with at some point; if you'd like to work with me on one of these, offer support, or even adopt it as your own project and go (I'm not clinging to or possessive of these ideas by any means!) go for it.

• OLPC webcomic
• Rosetta Stone clone in Pygame
• Front-end for music composition (GUI for Lilypond? Something to translate between TamTam and Lilypond?)
• "Heathkit" style build-your-own peripheral kits for the XO (solder your own gamepad, etc)
• Intro to electrical engineering through taking apart & developing for the XO
• Ad Libris, a lightweight metadata structure spec for the Library.

Past

• I was one of the coordinators of the first OLPC Game Jam (and indeed, the first OLPC Jam), Game Jam Boston June 2007.