[Testing] The Tech Museum as a testing venue?

[Luke Faraone]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Robert Stephenson <
rstephe at alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

> Hi, folks, allow me to introduce myself.  I work at The Tech Museum of
> Innovation in San Jose, and we have been talking with Ed Cherlin about
> the possibility of setting up an XO cluster (or two).  It started with
> this question:
> > The Tech has a lot of Title 1 schools that visit the museum as part
> > of their educational program.  We are planning a classroom area that
> > will be within and a part of the regular museum -- in other words
> > dual purpose: exhibit when not in use and classroom otherwise.  Is
> > it possible that we could get enough laptops (24-30, plus spares) to
> > outfit a whole class of students?
>
> The focus of the classes, and of the exhibit the rest of the time,
> would be on media (music, remixes, graphics, videos, etc.)
> production.  We can easily provide access to OLPC folks, either
> physically or virtually (no firewall).  We have thousands of kids
> running loose every day, so it would be a great user and endurance
> test.  Does this sound like a possibility?


The one thing you'd have to worry about: While the XOs are very resilient to
harsh conditions, they are _not_ "childproof", ie. if a kid throws it off a
desk or picks at the rubber mesh keyboard then he _can_  break the XO.

It would be a *highly* useful tool, however, in testing and research.
Assuming we can have the teachers/whoever survey the children and note where
they have problems, it would provide a load of real-world data easily
accessible and tweakable.


-- 
Luke Faraone, who loved going to the Tech as a child and still visits today
http://luke.faraone.cc
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