User talk:Mchua: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:22, 22 July 2007

Leave me a message on this talk page by clicking here. For other methods of contact (including "Mel, I need you now, where are you) see my userpage.

A belated...

Welcome!

Welcome to the One Laptop per Child wiki. Please make yourself at home; read through the Table of Contents and FAQ, and take a look around. If you need a general wiki-tutorial, Wikieducator has some excellent ones.

Some possible pages of interest:

Feel free to leave me a note on my talk page if you have further questions or need help finding your way around.

Cheers, Sj

Yellow... yellow soy milk?

Notes from conversation with taxi driver 5/6/07

Taxi driver: Math is scary

Untrained people who don't know the math behind what they're doing can often build better things than engineers who know the mathematics can.
People already know physics intuitively, even if they don't have formal education.
When you start using math to describe physics, you start scaring people away because the math is so foreign (and besides they often don't need to know the math to do things, as noted above).
You can't do "higher-level" physics without math.
Therefore, we can't teach some folks physics because it will scare them away (maybe even scaring them away from the physics they already know).

Ian and Mel: Math is not scary

There is a way to do math without scaring people!
Physical intuition is very important!
Math is just a language we use to describe the predictions and observations we make about physics.
People tend to not be scared away by things they already know. If we can teach people stuff by putting it in the context of things they already know, we can be much less scary.
We want to start with the intuition people already have about the physical world, so the math makes sense in context, it's motivated by something.
You can start with very simple mathematics to describe things. For instance, F=ma can be translated "If something is more massive (probably "heavy" in common speech) you have to push it harder to get it to go faster." This is basically variable naming.
After variable naming you can move into quantization ("more massive" becomes "35 kilograms" and "push" becomes "3 Newtons") and then addition, multiplication, etc. but the math is motivated by what you need to describe (in fact, a lot of math, such as most of vector calc, was created so that we could describe stuff happening in physics.)
Sometimes you can't just try things with physical intuition; for instance, if you are trying to work with something very big/heavy/dangerous you can't necessarily afford to make a mistake, you need to find out through calculation how it will behave first.

From Lauren

Created Wikimania, tho I left my notebook of what to put in it at home.... --Lauren 17:29, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

Minirelease?

Is there still a minirelease scheduled for today? I could kick in a simple 'shows a ruler and cm/mm grids' activity. Otherwise I'll aim for CR1. Cheers, MitchellNCharity 12:24, 25 June 2007 (EDT) (Feel free to delete once seen.)

O^2

cf. Organizing organizing --> a good foundation for intern coordination.

Related todo: a mesh of tasks (existing, published), and of places to collate them.

RE: Thanks for the wiki help!

follow-up to User talk:Xavi#Thanks for the wiki help!

The goof? I was lucky... I had seen the talk page in recent changes, but then I noticed a red link in the page... :)

As for Xoxo I'm sure SJ would like the extra pair of hands (me too, but SJ is the father of the beast ;) Currently, I'm torn appart between off-olpc duties and trying to make a wiki parser for automatic stats and highlights (we'll see how it works) maybe I'll have something ready for this weekend... but still, we are lacking a review on the mailing lists (although I think User:MitchellNCharity and User:RafaelOrtiz were going to give a hand... :) Most definitely a summary or highlight of the 1cc community front would be welcome (I'd really like to hear what's being shuffled over there :) Cheers, --Xavi 17:57, 12 July 2007 (EDT)

check out ben's page for a mentorship/internship

User_talk:Bnardone and subpages. we should ping him... Sj talk 19:22, 13 July 2007 (EDT)

Hi, Mchua

It's a good idea for me and my Korean fellows. I will have some tea time to discuss the agenda with my fellows and leave messages here in one or two days... cheers php5 23:09, 14 July 2007 (EDT)

Could give me some scenario about the Manilla Jam? saying..daily schedules, how to advertise the meeting, financial information, expected attendants and so on. It had better put on the Jam page in this wiki. it may help us much. cheers php5 20:44, 15 July 2007 (EDT)

The information is very helpful. I'm now writing some plans related to Curricula or Content Jam. As soon as completing the draft, i'll post it on the wiki. then, let's have some disscussion about them (those in Manilla and Seoul). php5 20:57, 15 July 2007 (EDT)

Content Jam - Nepal

Thank you for your interest and willingness to help. It would be great if you share the experiences and contents of "Manila Jam". My irc nick is shankar. Shankar 14:07, 15 July 2007 (EDT)

Kuku Testing

Hey Mel - I can imagine installing python and pygame would be pretty tricky - it still is for me!!! The best thing to do would be for us to get our act together and make some windows and mac universal binaries. We'll def look into it. Thanks for setting up all the testing, and let me know if I need to do anything else. jblucks 21:11, 15 July 2007 (EDT)

team notes

see your talk page there for notes. Sj talk 00:01, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

welcome to the mop-and-bucket crew

be careful with them, especially the 'delete' and block features. almost everything you do can be undone by other admins, though. Sj talk 02:02, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

Testing talk page link

Kindly stolen from sj's talk page. Mchua 03:23, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

firefox

Thanks! Will do in my firefox (although I admit it, Opera has been my browser of choice ;) Now, if the bookmarks had some bookmarks for the Google searches specific to the wiki, now that would be something :)

BTW, congratulations and welcome to the sysop-gang! :) --Xavi 08:37, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

Icon/Design for Review Suad

Hey, I was wondering if you could give me a bit more info on the project, but I do have some ideas, thanks!--Delucks 14:06, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

SoCon translations

Hi! Any reason why you are using ~~{{SoCon translations}}~~ instead of /translations and the translating 'framework'? Or is it just the result of .cpp (CopyPasteProgramming)? ;) --Xavi 18:18, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

follow up to User talk:Xavi#Re: summer of content translations

I was just curious if it was a new idea/way on how to handle the translations or not :) I know the current 'framework' (if I dare call it such) is just a hack and that it should be reviewed at some point... so maybe this was it :)

If you don't mind, I'll 'standardize' it before translators get a hold of it... btw, the base code (read the 'main' page) is a bit unfriendly for translators, but that should be just a barrier for the initial setup, the subpages (or page inclusions rather) should be simple enough :) --Xavi 19:38, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

Summer of Code webcomic

Hi, my name's Karen Rustad and I'm a senior at Scripps College involved with FreeCulture.org. I saw under the 'mentors' section that you were interested in an open webcomic project (looking at your profile, more specifically an OLPC webcomic). I drew my own webcomic in the past and will be writing another one next year for my senior project, so I'd be very interested in this. I was wondering what you had in mind for the webcomic (a webcomic about the history of the OLPC project? an OLPC how-to? an exciting action/adventure story involving an OLPC? something else entirely?). If you could email me (karen@freeculture.org) with more details I'd greatly appreciate it!

Re: above post

Mind CCing me on that and/or mentioning the art community (whatever you think would be appropriate, of course)? --Nikki 02:51, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

Media Wiki script

Maybe this might help ? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jcobbers/youtube_extension --Arjs 21:00, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

Were you able to get the scripts installed ? -arjs