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

[Arjun Sarwal]

On 8/6/08, Marc Valentin <mvalentin at oeuvredespains.org> wrote:
> Hi Shirish !
>
> >The most interesting I felt was the work shown with low-cost
> >sensing networks.
> Can you give some more details ? I don't see the purpose of this.
> Specially in the context of a class.
>

Sensors have been used for learning purposes. They allow one to
connect with the physical world and also open up the world for a large
number of learning by doing activities.

However working with sensors has traditionally been an expensive
affair and hence out of reach for most people and students. The XO
makes everything and more possible by connecting low cost easily
available sensors simply to the Mic-In port.
(See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure for a general overview)


One small example, I can remember is that what Arnans Roger gave me
once when he was working with a group of children in Thailand. The
children thought about understanding why it was so hot in their hostel
rooms and wanted to remedy solutions. They started by monitoring and
recording the temperature at one hour intervals at different points in
the room. They used low cost temperature sensors  that they connected
to the GoGo board (a great generic hardware board designed around an
Atmega8 microcontroller)

They observed the results and tried to draw inferences as to where it
was the most hot, when it was the hottest etc. Then they also tried to
measure humidity at different points of the day by comparing output
from  a temperature sensor dipped in moist cotton and using the other
temeprature sensor to measure humidity.

They tried out a number of different solutions to reduce the humidity
by opening more vents at times of the day when it was the most humid.

While they might not have been able to significantly reduce the
temperature in their rooms, a simple low cost temperature sensor
offered so much of learning !!


This is just one example, imagine learning about trees and
photosynthesis and being acually be able to measure light intensity at
different points of the day at diferent parts of the plant.

Recently at a pilot in Meerut UP they did experiments using low cost
cost sensors. This is their report --
http://iridescentlearning.org/joomla/images/stories/forEducators/chiraghgrammarschool_olpc_2008-04-30.pdf





> >He also showed us an application very similar to turtleart
> The application was in Windows ?! I don't understand why David Cavallo
> showed you an application you cannot use on the XO.

Cudve been 'Etoys' perhaps ?


regards
Arjun

>
> -marc-
> http://www.OeuvreDesPains.org
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-- 
Arjun Sarwal
http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SwcSEcfR464