Talk:OLPC Peru/Arahuay

Hi

Great report! I really appreciate the detailed descriptions of the people and the setting.

I want to follow up and work on developing software to make this deployment as successful as possible. By "developing" I mean empowering the teachers and student to create what's most important to them. I hope all the users will feel that they can mold and adapt the XO to serve their purposes. I see it as a process of coming together of developers and students to teach each other what is important and what is possible.

I'm looking for a challenge or two to get started. The more specific and focused the better to get us started with something achievable.

I saw your list of software recommendations. It looks like those are mostly bugs which are addressed.

I wonder if you have some suggestions for more "feature" or learning driven challenges.

I saw on a development list that a teacher in Peru was interested in printing. I did a little research and you can print from the XO but its not trivial to configure. More documentation on how to be posted shortly at this link: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Printer_Support

In order to make that really usable I have a few questions. e.g. do they have a printer on the network or do they need to print over serial or maybe that want to put a file on a USB stick, carry it to another computer and print from there? Which program and/or file format do they want to print from?

Or maybe printing really isn't a important requirement right now....

Another idea I had is to take the picture of "caring about our senses" and see what kind of activities we could come up with to help teach that. The visual material for the classes is definitely remarkable and I wonder how we can keep that creativity when using the XO.

If you know of a curriculum goal or subject that they want to teach we could start looking for and creating software to help with that.

Any feedback or direction you have on what to focus on for this deployment is greatly appreciated. Leave a note on my talk page or comment here if you like.

I want to start a dialog but I definitely don't want to bog down the teachers/students with a bunch of questions. I also have limited time so I don't want to promise any results I can't deliver. That said, with the right focus I think we can mobilize a lot of supporting resources if we can define a good problem and engage a rich dialog.

Thanks,

Greg S

PS - Hablo español mas o menos si cualquier persona prefiere utilizar esa lengua