Nepal:Pilot Project Plan

Pilot Details

Nepal's Department of Education is planning to pilot OLPC at a test school in April of 2008. Nepal's Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal, strongly support the OLPC program. Currently, the pilot is planned at a Kathmandu-area school. The Danish IT Society has generously donated roughly 200 XO laptops for the pilot.

50 laptops should arrive in Mid-March and the remainder will arrive early April. The pilot will take place at a single school in the outskirts of Kathmandu. Laptops will be piloted in grades 2 and 6 (ages 6 and 11).

OLE Nepal is coordinating many aspects of pilot including teacher training, learning activity development, networking, and hardware deployment.

Team Members

From the Department of Education:

• Baburam Poudel, oversees pilot implementation
• Khaga Raj Poudel, assists Baburam
• Kamal Kafle, computer engineer
• Arjun Aryal, computer engineer

From OLE Nepal

• Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta, Teacher training and curriculum development for the pilot
• Bryan Berry, lead systems engineer
• Sulochan Acharya, systems engineer

Other groups involved:

• FOSS Nepal is helping with localization - Subir Pradhanang and Basanta Shrestha particularly
• Nepal Wireless will help connect the school to the Internet using Wifi Point-to-Point links
• OLPC Nepal Localization and activity development

Other volunteers:

• Tony Pearson, software engineer

Personnel Needs: Need to designate someone to test and prepare the power solutions. Ram Krishna Singh would be ideal but he is very busy developing activities for the pilot.

Timeline

The Nepali government still hasn't selected the pilot school. We will shift much of the testing to the school premises once it is selected.

Week 1 Feb 11 - 15

Build out basic features of test School Server and several test XO's

Week 2 - Feb 17 - 22

Comprehensively test Deployment Build 1 for the School Server together w/ XO's

The Deployment Build for the server is simply the stock XS 150 Build plus the content we are bundling into it

See the online spreadsheet for what's included in Deployment Build 1

Week 3 - Feb 24 - 29

1. Fix problems found Deployment Build 1
2. Stress test XO's, school server, and active antenna
3. Work on automating the hardware testing process, particularly for testing XO batteries and mesh networking

Week 4 - March 2 - 7

1. Work on XS Deployment build 2 for the School Server
2. Testing should begin at the school site by this time

Week 5 - March 9 - 14

1. Test XS Deployment Build 2
2. Set up and test a deployment build for the XO for the pilot

Important dates:

• March 15th - Receive 50 XO's

• Early April - Receive 150 additional XO's

• April 5 or 8 -- 7 days training session for teachers

• April 10th -- National Parliamentary Elections, may delay start of school

• April 13th -- School starts

• April 13 - 15 -- In-school training for kids and teachers

Teacher Training Plan

• The training will be for a total of 7 days.
• The first 4 days of the training will be residential (i.e., in a hotel/motel away from the school)--could be from April 5 to 8
• The teachers will go home after that. And there will be a few days gap before the start of the school year.
• During this gap, the elections will be held. Plus the teachers will have a couple of days of formal interactions with parents and other stakeholders in the school itself where they will not only introduce the participants