OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-04-05

1. Peru: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Peru regarding this week's teacher preparation workshops. Teachers in four locations—Huancayo, Huampani, Chiclayo, and Arequipa—spent the week exploring the XO laptop—running the new software release, Build 703—and engaging in pedagogical discussions about technology and learning.

2. Mongolia: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin returned from Mongolia with news that a steering committee chaired by the MoE has been formed to oversee the deployment of the first 10000 laptops in Mongolia. Already, a campaign is underway to raise money for one laptop per child in all of Mongolia. The media coverage has been voluminous and the children at the two pilot schools have been thriving. The President of Mongolia remarked: "In the past, Mongolians explored the world by horseback. Today they will explore it with their laptops."

3. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Pakistan that the program at the Atlas School is going very well, with the children's excitement accelerating day by day. For the first two weeks, the children concentrated on music (Tam Tam) and video (Record). Presently, they are using the Write activity. They are fond of using the library to read story books in Farsi and to browse through maps. They also the multimedia activity (Watch & Listen), which they use to play music.The 5th graders have explored Etoys and are helping the younger children as well.

4. Senegal: OLPC at IDLELO3: Fatimata Seye Sylla presented OLPC at the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) in Dakar Senegal. Under the theme "Making the knowledge economy work for Africa", this 3rd conference gathered hundreds of experts, decision makers, educators, and media experts from 20 different countries to exchange about the use of Free and Open source software for the development of Africa. OLPC had a booth manned by school children showing off their proficiency with Sugar.

5. Nepal: Dev Mohanty has posted online how he and Mahabir Pun are using inexpensive wireless equipment to connect Bishwamitra and Bashuki pilot schools to the Internet and each other. The wireless network has an effective bandwidth of 8 Mbps between nodes (See [1]).

The OLE Nepal team led four days of teacher training for 24 teachers, two community members, two school principals, and the School Supervisor for Bashuki and Bishwamitra Schools. Trainers Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta led many sessions on how the Constructivist theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert and the XO can be used to fully engage children in creating, exploring, and expressing. On the final day of training, the teachers led Constructivist lessons using that XO laptops that they themselves designed. See [2].

6. Story Jam, NYC: SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Henry Edward Hardy and Mel Chua represented OLPC at the OLPC co-sponsored Story Jam New York event at UNICEF's HQ in New York City. Special thanks to Mel Chua who helped organize the event. Among the participants were Ecuador's Ambassador to the US, Luis Gallegos, Ryan Brack, Chief of Staff for the New York City Department of Education, Chris Canizzaro, Research Asst. Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Richard Graves, Program Director of Americans for Informed Democracy, Andy Jordan, Technology Reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online and Matt Lee, Campaign Manager for the Free Software Foundation.

7. Game Jam Brasil: A GameJam 2008 competition targetting children ages six to 14 is being organized by Professor Lea Fagundes and her colleagues and students (See Game_Jam_Brasil/2008).

8. Looking ahead: Scott Ananian hosted a mini conference at 1CC Thursday and Friday of this week (See Mini-conference). Topics included: Frameworks for Collaboration (Ben Schwartz), Suspend/Resume (Richard Smith), Power Management (Chris Ball), UI features (Eben Eliason), olpcfs (Scott Ananian), Communications Outlook (Dafydd Harries), School Server (Martin Langhoff), and State of Security (Michael Stone).

9. MIT: Henry Hardy represented OLPC at International Development night at the MIT museum on Friday, April 4.

10. Multi-battery charger: Lilian Walters and Richard Smith continue to make progress on the multi-battery charger. Richard also began bug triaging and planning for the next round of modifications to go into the EC code for Update 2.

11. i18n: Sayamindu Dasgupta continued to work on making the Pootle server less resource hungry; he is investigating two approaches: Pootle-diet, which caches translation statistics in a simple database; and libgettext-po, which is a PO-file parsing backend for the translate-toolkit. Sayamindu has also managed to clean up and validate the POT files for the OLPC website—he is currently merging the pre-existing translations with the POT files. The laptop.org website will be translatable via Pootle by this weekend.

Walter Bender signed off with Quanta on two new keyboard layouts: one for Nigeria and one for Haiti. Khmer, Nepali, and Italian are queued up. Walter has been working with Bernie Innocenti, Arjun Sarwal, Manusheel Gupta, and Rabi Karmacharya on the integration of compose characters into the X Window System keyboard mapping tables in order to better support Nepali, some West African languages, and to be able to use exclusively "dead keys" with the US International keyboard.

The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto.

12. Sugar: Tomeu Visozo, Eben Eliason, Marco Presenti Gritti, and Simon Schampijer have been working tirelessly on the Sugar redesign (See Designs). The first phase has landed in the last Joyride build (1825). It is far from complete, but please to try it and provide feedback.

Simon reviewed, polished and fixed numerous bugs. Marco has taught him how to build all the relevant sugar packages as part of a transiating process—Marco is only be part-time on the Sugar project and thus cannot be the primary maintainer any longer. Simon built the packages currently in joyride. He also released a new terminal activity that autoscrolls to the bottom when there is input.

Morgan Collett released Chat-37.xo into Joyride, with a UI change as specified by Eben's mockups (See Chat); multiple sequential messages by the same sender are merged together into the same "bubble", which saves on screen space. Morgan also fixed an alignment problem for right-to-left scripts, e.g. Arabic (Ticket #6561).

13. Qirat Activity: Waqas Toor has been working on the new update in light of the feedback received from different volunteers. Based on the prototype reported earlier, now we have five short Surahs (chapters) and Ayat-ul-Kursi (stanza) converted into a read-recite activity (See Educational_content_ideas#Memorization_and_Regurgitation_Support).

14. OLPC flash: Richard Smith has been working on olpcflash, an application for programming the SPI flash from Linux.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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Video

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Testimonials about my XO laptop

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