Contributors

NEWS

Check back this site often! You will need to fill in more details and an official submission again later. For now it is ok to collect information project descriptions below. This will change as we move the whole thing into a DB.

Who?

The community of OLPC contributors includes many people working on

outreach,
testing,
usability,
content and
software development, and
hardware development and hacking,

which are improved by access to laptops. Software and hardware developers have long been able to get laptops through the software developers program; we are opening this process up to all projects from the community aimed at furthering OLPC's mission.

Contributors laptop program

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Developers_program/tmp. (Discuss)

To apply for laptops for your project or proposal, please add a brief project description below, and list the contributors and participants working on the project, and how laptops would be helpful. Indicate any relevant experience or collaborations (Sugar emulation, education, usability and interface design, work with children; research partnerships, school partnerships, &c.).

Project proposals

To propose a new project, create a section with the following:

==== [[Projects/<projectname>|<projectname>]] ====
; Project:
; Proposer:
; Other contributors:
; Audience or impact:
; Brief description:  (link to a full description at [[Projects/PROJECTNAME]])
; Relevant experience & other projects:
; Contact information (wiki, email, &c):
; [If requesting XOs] # of XOs needed, and their use:

When requesting laptops through the Contributors program: include the last line above. Some questions to answer:

Have you tried emulation for this purpose?
Could you use laptops for a limited time borrowed from a local community pool of machines?
Similarly, would other projects be able to share these laptops, or would they be in constant use?
What power supply or keyboard do you need?

Be sure you have a valid email address for your wiki account as one way to reach you.

Current applications

Note: please create an account on this wiki and sign your application below with four tildes: <tt>~~~~</tt>

Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes

Note: This was a GSoC proposal
Project: Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes
Proposer: Abhishek Tiwari
Other contributors: -
Audience or impact: - School Administration (Can easily conduct examinations, view statistics - a total examination / statistical management system); - Teachers (Ease out and standardize teaching processes with efficient examination support); - Students (Can give exams online/offline, get question banks, practice papers, etc)
Brief description: Examination process is an integral and a very important part of academics and Moodle (being planned to be installed; on school servers under OLPC) as of now is only related to E-Learning processes but does not deals with any activity regarding; Examination processes. The scope of this project is to extend Moodle to provide an easy customizable environment for faculty and; examination controllers to form a database of questions over a Distributed Network (or may be Intranet as well at School under OLPC); which could thus be used to generate examination papers for conducting examinations as well as for practice of students.; A detailed proposal can be seen at: Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes
Relevant experience & other projects: Mentioned on Project Page (portfolio of previous work available as external link mentioned; on project proposal page)
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): Shipping Address & Other contact information on user page: Abhishek Tiwari
1 XOs needed Usage: Testing the reliability, performance and compatibility of system over XO environment and configuration with; each development step.

Abhishek Tiwari 16:02, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Preparing a Pilot Leiden, The Netherlands

Project: 2012 Leiden
Proposer: Marten
Other contributors: a local team
Audience or impact: - Teachers (Training); - University Leiden (research); - Content Owners/Builder; - Childern, building cases of experiential learning
Brief description: Currently Preparing a pilot and infrastructure, setting the Train Teachers, Test Content/XS/Backups.; To get an impression presentation

Relevant experience & other projects: Read more here more about me
Contact information: Marten I have tested emulation and still use it. If have asked grassroot_nl to use these. However the 3 XO's are sufficient for all grassrooters in NL. When not in use I will share these XO's with Grassroots_nl and other XO-projects.
XO's needed: 3, European Standards, 220V | desired keyboard layout : US English; - Train teachers,; - Content testing at the Content Compagny; - Demonstation Model when talking Government, Sponsors, University

-- Marten 16:18, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

lx700video

Project name: LX-700 hacking
Projekt proposer: Thorsten Haas
Other contributors: -
Project audience or impact: OLPC proper - new functionalities in the XO
Project description and relevant experience: See Projects/lx700video
Need for laptops: 1
Status: handed out on 30th Dec 2007

Software Defined Radio

Project name: Software Defined Radio
Projekt proposer: Thomas Kleffel
Other contributors: -
Project audience or impact: OLPC could be used as shortwave data/audio receiver in remote areas
Project description and relevant experience: Projects/SDR
Need for laptops: 1
Have you tried emulation for this purpose? Doesn't work for assessing OLPC's performance (Sound IO / Processing Power) Tk 07: 04, 30 December 2007 (EST)

Status: handed out on 30th Dec 2007

Internet via GSM

Project name: GSM 4 XO
Project proposer: Olaf Emcke
Other contributors: -
Project audience or impact: Use a mobile to access internet via GSM
Project description: Projects/gsm4xo
Need for laptops: 1

Budget Robotics Kit

Project name: Robotics Kit
Projet proposer: Willibald Palatin
Other contributors: Chris
Project impact: Possibility to play with sensors and actuators
Project description: Build a budget robotics controller, based on the ATMega series (possibly use an arduino board). Connected via USB, open source and easily assemble- and programmable, with a simple GTK interface. At least 10 pins to read sensor values or send/pulse +5V DC.

Develop Teaching the Teachers to teach with OLPC

Project name: Teach Teachers to teach
Projet proposer: B-Ranger (@web.de)
Other contributors
Project impact: If you want Teachers in OLPC-Use-Areas to use the olpc in class you first need them to know what

they can do. That for you may want to develop ideas for them and a introduction that makes the teacher enthusiastic
about the olpc so that she/he can 'infect' her/his pupils. And for developing that "teach-the-teacher" you may want
to have a presentation, test and try-object.
The idea is to develop a program that teaches german/austrian (teaching) students, so they can take the olpc to a
foreign country and tell the ppl (esp. the local teachers) about it and show them the benefits.

QKD project

Project name: EntangleMe
Project proposer: National U. of Singapore
Project impact: show off XOs being used for science
Details: see projects/EntangleMe

MoinMoin wiki

Project name: MoinMoin
Project proposer: ThomasWaldmann
Other contributors
Project audience or impact: all users wanting to use a wiki (e.g. for notes, knowledge base, ...)
Project description and relevant experience: see http://moinmo.in/; Proposer is project admin of MoinMoin project and a long term Python developer.
Need for laptops: 2 (to test wiki sync and collaboration)

Low cost microcontroller experimentation kit

Project: Low cost microcontroller experimentation kit
Proposer: User:deBaer
Audience or impact: Giving children the possibility to build their own stand-alone hardware projects on a breadboard with a microcontroller.
Brief description: Developing a low-cost open source kit with a breadboard, a microcontroller, a few simple components (buttons, LEDs, ...) that is in-system programmable from the XO. Make an easy-to-use activity that shows the board setup and allows developing and programs the microcontroller code. Allow editing and sharing of those projects. See Projects/MicrocontrollerKit)
Relevant experience & other projects: Information Technology engineer, teaching in higher education, Linux developer since 1995
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): deBaer æt gmail døt com
XOs needed: 1 for getting into SUGAR development and testing microcontroller programming methods

Integration with CMS back-end storage

Project: Use OLPC laptopts to create digital storage of lectures in elementary and secondary schools
Proposer: User:dpavlin
Audience or impact: Students of elementary and secondary schools (age 6-18)
Brief description: We are developing portal for schools which would be ideal place to collect lectures which could be captured using OLPC camera for other students who are unable to attend lectures (sick friends, and similar)
Relevant experience & other projects: Implementation of current CMS system for the last two years with 330 schools currently connected to system (from total of 3300)
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): dpavlin@carnet.hr
XOs needed: 1 to test integration with CMS, later it will end up in one of the schools

Introduce XO to Rotterdam (the Netherlands) schools

Project: Trial of OPLC laptop in elementary schools for possible city wide deployment.
Proposer: MaartenM79
Audience or impact: Students of elementary and secondary schools (age 6-18)
Brief description: I would like to test out the XO in elementary schools in Rotterdam.
Relevant experience & other projects: As chairman of the youth political party CDJA in Rotterdam I am very interested in promoting information technology, especially for young children. Our party has the councilor of education in Rotterdam and I would like to promote the laptop to him.
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): m.menheere at gmail.com
XOs needed: 2 for demonstration purposes (on loan is ok too), i'm looking for contacts. 20 for classroom test

Game based eVideo for XO mesh networks

Project: Evaluation of video- and game based (e)learning scenarios.
Proposer: Anja C. Wagner 09:02, 2 January 2008 (EST)
Other contributors: Fabian Topfstedt, Henrik Regensburg, Hans L. Cycon, WiseWoman
Audience or impact: Teachers and students in schools, high schools, universities, and continuing
education need dynamic learning scenarios for motivation. Some scenarios include the use of video
and video conferencing.
Brief description: The use of instructional video - especially with the possibility of including
localized subtitles or dubbed audio - provides an excellent platform for presenting international
open educational resources. Video conferencing allows direct, synchronous communication within
classrooms or beyond classroom walls. We are developing new scenarios, sometimes called (e)learning
2.0, that includes video and video conferencing for educating learners using new technologies for
personal needs. In order to motivate people to educate themselves, we are also investigating
narrative and competitive structures from the gaming industry. We want to see if our video formats
perform on the XO computers with their special displayes and evaluate different video conferencing
tools to work with the wireless mesh network.
Relevant experience & other projects: As an interdisciplinary project team in the context of a
University for Applied Sciences, at the FHTW Berlin, we have acquired much experience in the
area of video formats (also called codecs) and video conferencing and in their application in the
area of (e)learning. Our most recent project is concerned with developing technical and
methodological skills on the use of video and game based learning scenarios - using video and video
conferencing. See the eVideo Project Blog (in German).
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): acw ÄT edufuture PÜNKT de
XOs needed: 3 for collaborative testing of new video-based learning scenarios.
XO requirements: Power supply 220V/50Hz to use in Germany and Austria. Preferred keyboard layouts
are 2x de_DE and 1x intl. (or en_EN, en_US). XOs will be in constant use in Berlin/Germany and
Vienna/Austria for communication purposes, emulation isn't possible due to the need of physical
access to camera and microphone)

Navigation System on XO

Project: Navigation System on XO
Proposer: parabelboi
Brief description: Add Sugar support to a Linux based Navigation System. It looks like Navit is suitable for that purpose. It already has pluggable and extensible Code. A Sugar GUI backend has to be written.
XOs needed: 1

SSR on the OLPC

Project: Mesh Network Comparison
Proposer: Thomas Fuhrmann and Benedikt Elser 10: 04, 8 January 2008 (EST)
Impact: Improvement of OLPC's mesh networking capabilities
Brief description: Compare the Current OLPC Mesh Networking implementation to an alternative implementation, namely the scalable source routing (SSR) protocol and the virtual ring routing (VRR) protocol. See publications: Fuhrmann, IFIP Networking 2005 and Caesar et al., SIGCOMM 2006 and SSR
XOs needed: 3 For handing out to Students and testing

Video Editing for the XO

Project: "Arrange", "Edit", and "Mix"
Proposer: Robert Ochshorn
Impact: Arrange is an addition to the "Record" activity, Edit and Mix form a new core application
Brief description: "Arrange" allows basic sequencing of media in Record, "Edit" allows advanced track-based sequencing of audio and video, "Mix" auto-generates montages. See Projects/VideoEditing)
Need for laptops: 1

Pilot study Communication and Collaboration scripts for Children

Project: "Collaborate - communicate": partnerschips between kids in different cultural environments
Proposer: "Michele Notari / Martin Hofmann / Beat Doebeli Honegger" [[1]]
Impact: "Getting involved in how to use the XO as tool for learning, focussing collaboration 
   and communication in informal learning situations"
Brief description: "Collaboration": We want to analyse mechanismes and concepts 
   of collaboration and communication of kids using the Xo' in (formal and) 
   informal learning situations.
   We will formulate needs do's and dont's for using XO's in target countries. 
   We plan partnerships with teacher education universities in other countries and will connect the participating swiss children with children in the other countries.   
   Communication and collaboration might take place with non textual media (image / sound /). 
Need for laptops: 50 Power supply 220V/50Hz to use in Switzerland. 
   Preferred keyboard layouts are de_DE ).
   XOs will be in constant use in St. Gallen and Schwyz, emulation isn't possible due to the fact,
   that we want to equip two classes of children  in primary schools with the XO's. 
   Collaboration among the children should take place using mesh network. 
   We wish to compare the two classes.

PATH

Project: PATH
Proposer: Seth(isforinsects) on behalf of Path
Other contributors: Path, SeattleXO
Audience or impact: Path is a multi-national NGO health care organization. They are interested in deploying the XO as a rugged laptop for some of their workers in some of their 18 countries of operation.
Brief description: Giving Path these machines would allow for them to give the XO a full trial for implementation and research further contributions towards Health projects with OLPC> (link to a full description at Projects/PATHdeployment)
Relevant experience & other projects
Contact information (wiki, email, &c)
[If requesting XOs] # of XOs needed, and their use

XO Software development in hacker spaces around Cologne/Bonn, Germany

Project: XO Software development in hacker spaces around Cologne/Bonn, Germany
Proposer: Jens Ohlig, jens@ccc.de
Other contributors: various
Audience or impact: local community of young and gifted hackers, eager to churn out new exciting software for the OLPC XO. We want to hack, learn, share, and teach software development on the OLPC XO.
Brief description: Hackerspaces in the Cologne/Bonn region in Western Germany have a tradition of bringing together young people to work on projects. We want to form a software development group for these. (link to a full description)
Relevant experience & other projects: Experience with hacker spaces for more than ten years. Running a hacking project with young people since 2002 (U23).
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): jens@ccc.de Cologne space: http://koeln.ccc.de Bonn space: http://netzladen.org
# of XOs needed, and their use: 3 (1 for the space in Cologne which already has one, 2 other for the space in Bonn. 2 XOs are needed in each place in order to do experiments with the mesh networking)

Suspend-Resume QA as well as GASP development

Project: Suspend-Resume QA
Proposer: FFM
Other contributors: Matthew Gallagher, Thomas Doggette, and various others
Audience or impact: local high school (Yorktown High School, Arlington, Virginia), would be testing builds that would eventualy be released, reducing the number of bugs found in the field.
Brief description: We would test Suspend/resume and it's effect on different activities, and also wether the XO properly compensates for losses in the mesh. We would test our own activities, as well as assue that S/R works properly in the latest builds.
Relevant experience & other projects: We currently work on GASP, and already do (albeit limited) hardware testing on our B4s.
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): FFM

[If requesting XOs] # of XOs needed, and their use: One to two MPs (C2+), since B4s have documented suspend-resume issues. We currently have 3 B4s and could exchange some of them if needed, however we would like to allow more people at our location to collaberate on this. We would, in addition to S/R and normal HW QA, also give them to our developers to work on GASP.

Have you tried emulation for this purpose?

Since this testing requires hardware by its very nature,

Could you use laptops for a limited time borrowed from a local community pool of machines?

Yes, but see below.

Similarly, would other projects be able to share these laptops, or would they be in constant use?

They would also be able to be used by other students on the GASP project and others, and would (most likely) be returned by the studens once they discontinued their work on the project and the laptops redistributed.

What power supply or keyboard do you need?

US power supply. English keyboard prefered, but any MP laptop will do.

ffm 21:29, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC

Note: This was a GSoC proposal with the name "Study Web Usability of the chamber of the OLPC with Windows XP"
Project: Evaluation of the OLPC with Usability Engineering
Proposer: Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández
Audience or impact: Perú and LatinoAmérica.
Brief description: Making a comparative study of usability with the OLPC Sugar and WINDOWS. Through TEST usability in a marginal urban population of Lima, Peru. With a sample of 6 boys and 6 girls. With 1 test pilot, 1 test in sugar and 1 test in windows. From 6 to 8 years. My hypothesis is that girls will adapt faster to use Sugar than boys. The result would help improve the potential problems that have graphical interfaces for Sugar. I would like to complement this with my APP Google Summer Code The tests were conducted on the use of basic programs such as text editor or webcam. Using as an activity subject recopilacion games flash project huascaran www.huascaran.gob.pe could be used in the implementation of the programme. The activity will take the recommendations of the creation of a type. Activity testing template of wiki laptop. And recommendation from Nielsen and Rubin. The Test usability will be: take a picture. send a picture to friend. record a video. send the video. search a video or picture.
Relevant experience & other projects: This project is the execution of my graduate thesis at my university. I already have two and a half years on exploring the topic of usability. I know the issue of implementation of the OLPC in Peru. Last year we made a field study in the pilot ARAHUAY for our university. The evaluation we made the with two professors of computer for children. Now i am participate into Google Summer Code for PostNuke for App Usability & Accessability Overhaul mentored by Steffen Voß I tried to participate in the season from openusability. I do not check the deadline was over
Contact information (wiki, email, &c): unimauro@gmail.com, unimauro.blogspot.com

Projects/Fedora Ambassadors

Project: Fedora Ambassadors
Proposer: gdk
Number of Laptops: 20
Number of Months: 12
Description: We send ambassadors to dozens of events around the world every year. The goal is to have a Fedora pool of XOs that go from event to event, with preference going to Fedora ambassadors who give recruiting speeches for XO developers.
Experience: Many different levels of hardware experience, but all have a strong familiarity with Fedora.
Notes: Our ambassadors are highly motivated to participate in this project, and have been asking for XOs in their event kits all over the world for months now.

Contributors

Contents

NEWS

Who?

Contributors laptop program

Project proposals

Current applications

Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes

Preparing a Pilot Leiden, The Netherlands

lx700video

Software Defined Radio

Internet via GSM

Budget Robotics Kit

Develop Teaching the Teachers to teach with OLPC

QKD project

MoinMoin wiki

Low cost microcontroller experimentation kit

Integration with CMS back-end storage

Introduce XO to Rotterdam (the Netherlands) schools

Game based eVideo for XO mesh networks

Navigation System on XO

SSR on the OLPC

Video Editing for the XO

Pilot study Communication and Collaboration scripts for Children

PATH

XO Software development in hacker spaces around Cologne/Bonn, Germany

Suspend-Resume QA as well as GASP development

Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC

Projects/Fedora Ambassadors

See also

SprayPlay

Navigation menu

Contributors

NEWS

Who?

Contributors laptop program

Project proposals

Current applications

Customizing Moodle to include efficient Examination Processes

Preparing a Pilot Leiden, The Netherlands

lx700video

Software Defined Radio

Internet via GSM

Budget Robotics Kit

Develop Teaching the Teachers to teach with OLPC

QKD project

MoinMoin wiki

Low cost microcontroller experimentation kit

Integration with CMS back-end storage

Introduce XO to Rotterdam (the Netherlands) schools

Game based eVideo for XO mesh networks

Navigation System on XO

SSR on the OLPC

Video Editing for the XO

Pilot study Communication and Collaboration scripts for Children

PATH

XO Software development in hacker spaces around Cologne/Bonn, Germany

Suspend-Resume QA as well as GASP development

Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC

Projects/Fedora Ambassadors

See also

SprayPlay

Navigation menu

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