User:Ndoiron

I am a volunteer for The Kasiisi Project in Uganda and the Digital Literacy Project in the Boston area. Outside of the OLPC world, I study civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA).

Contact

Please e-mail ndoiron _at_ cmu.edu if you are interested in a project or have any questions

Experience in Uganda

Uganda was awesome! It was my first time teaching, and my first time programming in the field.

I taught an environmental sensing and maps class with The Kasiisi Project near Fort Portal, Uganda. The mission statement of the class became "Out of the Box" because not only were we trying new ways of learning, we were connecting our XOs with the world around us, outside the "box" of the laptop. You can find links to the activities, content, and hardware on my blog.

Technical Solutions from Kasiisi

These updates, written and tested at Kasiisi, can be applied to several activities worldwide.

• Bug fixes and keyboard interactions for Map and OfflineMap. Students had trouble with the mouse and sharing maps.

• Improved WikiBrowse with easier search, friendlier 404 page, addon articles ( see WikiPack )

• Redesign of Measure activity to assist teachers in explaining sensors and graphing.

• Improved SocialCalc with chart color selection, translatable chart UI, and full-screen HTML5 Canvas charts (for an offline deployment, the Google Chart frame was dead space)

• Gutenberg eBook + Librivox --> audiobook scripts

Content from Kasiisi

• Add-on WikiPacks of up-to-date articles and photos from Simple English Wikipedia, which work both in Browse and in WikiBrowse.

• PhotoPacks from BigPicture blog - download an example

• BookPack with audiobook support

Current Work

• Storing student reading history, book reports, and favorite sites on a teacher XO, using the mesh network. Allow long-term analysis of how students rate books and digital content. Ideally this program should be a library assistant which encourages students to read more, recommend books to friends, and choose challenging books.

• Spinoff of book activity called HealthReport

• Making lesson plans for Digital Literacy Project in Cambridge, Boston, and Nicaragua. Helping to supply useful content and activities.

• Citizen science projects for laptop schools in the US and abroad

Prior Work for the XO

• Links to downloadable content

• Major update to Map (activity) including offline mapping for Haiti, Uganda, and other countries. Maps can be customized using MapPacks.

• Adding bar, pie, line, and scatter charts to SocialCalc application
  • Test (in Firefox or XO's Browse) here
  • Users' Guide

• Mapping applications, introducing students to GIS and mapping
  • Intro to Mapping Technology
  • Explored SVG maps for classes without internet access

• Patch for the Geoquiz application