[OLPC India] Report on event held on 5th August 2008 at DAKC

[Sameer Verma]

shirish wrote:
> Hi all,
>    A workshop was organised by DAKC
> http://www.olpc.co.in/olpcindiaday/olpc-workshop.html
>  Reached DAKC (Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City), Thane at prompt
> 9:00 hours. Took in almost an hour to get my pass for the day. DAKC is
> beautiful and is spread over 120 odd acres. They had issues with not
> promoting the event as it could have been promoted and would have
> involved more people. Anyways we had tea and snacks and the workshop
> started at 11:15 sharp. Something around 20 odd people.
>  David Cavallo (who's also working at MIT Media Lab
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Media_Lab)
>  showed us the XO .
>
> This is the first time I have involved myself with the machine and the design is
> pretty clever. I also got to learn a bit about the Sugar Interface and
> it takes a bit to know why and how things work. The software is pretty
> much integrated with the hardware. For a normal desktop to function
> like OLPC, it would need a keyboard like the OLPC has, the keyboard
> bindings make it work the way it does. We used the XO for couple of
> hours, then had a Q&A. Post lunch he showed us how the OLPC is making
> changes across the world. He showed us something in ethopia, Mongolia
> and couple of other countries with some interesting unique use-cases.
> The most interesting I felt was the work shown with low-cost sensing
> networks. Seriously, RFID is just the tip of the iceberg if you look
> in sensor network technology. He also showed us an application very similar to
> turtleart (I forgot the name of application, it was in windows :(
> )which is using
> mathematics, geometry, programming for children. It was really interesting
> seeing how that tiny application could make it easier for teachers .
> He demonstrated
> the concept of making a square.
>
>  Of course they would need to be trained and stuff like that. We broke
> off for tea,
> had a round of Q&A and finished off everything by 18:00 hours. All in
> all had an interesting and engaging day ;)
>   

Hi Shirish,

Thanks for the update. This is very useful.

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/