OLPC News (2008-04-05)

Sat Apr 5 11:03:05 EDT 2008

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
http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/223).

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 http://blog.olenepal.org

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
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Brasil/2008).

8. Looking ahead: Scott Ananian hosted a mini conference at 1CC
Thursday and Friday of this week (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/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 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/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 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/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
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/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.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org