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

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Arjun Sarwal <arjun at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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 ?


or Scratch ??


Cheers,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]