[Olpc-uk] A potential partnership with Warwick UNICEF on Campus

Dev Lakhani d.lakhani at warwick.ac.uk
Sat Nov 7 10:50:37 EST 2009


Dear OLPC_UK

My name is Dev Lakhani, I am a postgrad at the University of Warwick and a
member of UNICEF On Campus here. Last week we had a 24 hour fast during
which I showed UNICEF members a video of Nicholas Negroponte (on ted.com)
and introduced everyone to the One Laptop Per Child Project.

Participants were really excited at the prospects of contributing content to
the laptop. Although many were not programmers they were keen to get people
involved and learn more about the project. Having found your group I am
really encouraged that we could form a viable working partnership.

Currently I, with the help of UNICEF members, am preparing a campus wide
campaign to raise awareness of the laptop but more importantly to get people
involved in generating and implementing content. There is a rich pool of
"early learning" educators, scientists, political, social, and computing
students available on campus and I am keen to make use of this skill set.

Our goal is particularly aimed at generating content that will address
issues related to UNICEFs work and vision. This involves producing
activities about better health and hygiene, improving  gender equality,
educating children about disease and its progression etc.

With that in mind we would be really appreciative of your help in terms of
technical advice, demos, content packaging, and implementation.

In particular (beyond what is on the WIKIs)

   -

   Programming help or training sessions to implement software. I had a go
   installing and running the “Hello World” on the Linux emulator but I could
   use some technical help to implement more involved, complex activities.
   (Unfortunately I am mainly experienced with JAVA)
   -

   Exposure to the final laptop product and its software-i.e. talks,
   presentations and live demo's of the games, activities and the laptop itself
   to bring the message home to people.
   -

   Help to test and deploy activities for deployment.

I will organize teams on campus that will capture ideas, write storyboards
and try and get computing students to implement software.

Would any of you please help us get the ball rolling? We would be grateful
for some short face to face talks, presentations and demo's as well as your
participation on some workshops to train our teams. Before we commit to this
project on campus we need to be aware of the amount of resource and effort
required and so would be grateful for your input.

If this sounds interesting to you, or if you need any more information,
please contact me (d.lakhani at warwick.ac.uk ) or our UNICEF On Campus
president Vanessa Ho, unicefoncampus.warwick at googlemail.com and we will make
arrangements to meet with you.

With many thanks

Dev

p.s. I apologise if this was the wrong mailing list to post to.
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