[OLPC-Chicago] New member

[sheila miguez]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now that I am on staff for PyCon 2009, and planning events that will
>  include the local community, I joined this list. My mother's family is
>  from Chicago, and I was born there when my father was in the Navy.
>
>  The idea for next year's PyCon is to organize a room full of children
>  doing Python on One Laptop Per Child XOs. Some people assume that it
>  means teaching children Python, but my real idea is to have the
>  children learn Python ahead of time, starting with the Pippy activity
>  on the laptop, and then be able to show adults or other children how
>  it all works and how one learns on the laptop. We should rotate in
>  groups of children of different ages, some to teach Python and the XO,
>  and some to show how children learn Python.

I really like this idea and if we get enough presentors we could have
a children session track. if not enough presentors, we could have some
kids lightning talks and open sessions.


>  So the first question is, how many children do we know who have XOs,
>  and can we organize something so they can work on Python together?

I am not sure we have enough XOs for a classroom of students from
varying backgrounds here in Chicago. Do you think it would be doable
to get a bunch of laptops of any kind from people and install sugar on
them so that we can teach python the XO way even without the hardware?

>  Second, whom else can we bring into our fold. I looked around on the
>  Net, and found a number of substantial African communities in Chicago,
>  including Kenyans, Rwandans, and Ethiopians, and I have no doubt that
>  there are many others. My interest in these three groups is that there
>  are more than 10,000 XOs each going to Rwanda and Ethiopia, and if we
>  can get Kenyans involved, we have an even stronger basis for inviting
>  Barack Obama to PyCon 2009 for a short speech and photo op. I suppose
>  we are more likely to get him if Hillary becomes President somehow,
>  but it never hurts to ask.
>
>  What do you think, Sirs?

I am on-call this week at work so I don't think I will have enough
time to do legwork. It depends on how busy it is at work this week (it
was bad over the weekend and I got paged at 5:30am and missed the
meeting saturday). So, If I do not reply with ideas this week, I will
reply next week, but here are some brainstorming things:

* Chicago is convenient since travel expenses would not be bad, but
perhaps we could have a small plan for kids in areas where there are a
lot of XO enthusiasts and then try to get some scholarship to bring
kids here if we can work things out with parents and gardiens.
good/bad idea?

* space: one can arrange meeting rooms with a library as long as the
public is welcome and no fees are charged. I think we are okay with
that. but I don't know how much we can arrange for once a week or
more. I think we could ask around k12 schools (have no clue here) or
do like we do with chipy meetings and ask for hosting -- problem with
hosting from businesses is that with chipy we are meeting after hours
and that might be too late.



-- 
sheila