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

Feb 10th ? - Submit use cases and Requirements

March 1 - Set activities and versions to be used on XO's for Pilot School

March 15th - Receive 50 XO's

• Test hardware, networking

Early April - Receive 150 additional XO's

April 1 -

• Internet connection to school thoroughly tested and operational
• School Server is operational and on site

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

Testing Plans

• Hardware
• Activities
• Networking
• Power