We’ve gotten RSVPs from friends old and new for this Saturday’s MIT Scratch Day in Arlington, VA. It’s going to be a fun event locally that’s part of an epic global day of celebration that will see our superhero orange cat dancing across thousands of computer screens. All of our event information is the same as previously announced, but here’s a recap and some new goodies:

Event:
Scratch Day 2012, Arlington, VA

Date/Time:
Saturday, May 19, 2012, 10am-2pm

Location:
Washington-Lee High School

Rooms 4207, 4209, and 4211
1301 N Stafford St
Arlington, VA 22201

Map: http://g.co/maps/7q2ru
Street View: http://g.co/maps/fjj52

Agenda:

• 10:00am – 10:15am – Welcome and introduction with Mike Lee
• 10:15am – 12noon – Scratch Learning Sessions in 2 or 3 classrooms with experts Paul Bui, Anthony Spanos and Richard Bullington-McGuire
• 12noon – 1:00pm – Lunch on your own; Yelp listing of restaurants nearby: http://j.mp/KucvN3
• 1:00pm – 1:45pm – Continue with the learning sessions
• 1:45pm – 2:00pm – Closing thoughts and prize raffle

And there are several interesting and related developments occurring this week:

MIT Media Lab Conversations Series Hosts Sugata Mitra – Wednesday May 16th 4:30-6:00pm (tomorrow!) Professor Sugata Mitra, champion of the concept of “minimally invasive education” (MIE), will discuss the question “Is Education Obsolete?” Mitra has most recently been collaborating with Nicholas Negroponte to test a deployment of 20 Android tablets in a remote village in Ethiopia. The talk will be webcast live and archived here: http://j.mp/JJ6fQr

5-day Preview of Scratch 2.0 – The Scratch team at the MIT Media Lab has been hard at work developing the next generation of Scratch, which will be completely web-based, requiring no installation of software. To commemorate Scratch Day and the 5th anniversary of the software, the team will open up the alpha version of the new site starting this Thursday May 17 through Monday May 21. The site is currently password protected, but check this link soon: http://alpha.scratch.mit.edu/ Here’s a preview video: http://vimeo.com/41683547

Get Your MaKey MaKey! – Two graduating members of the Scratch team, Eric Rosenbaum and Jay Silver, have revealed a new project on Kickstarter called MaKey MaKey. It’s an amazing little $35 circuit board that turns almost any real-word object into a computer keyboard or piano key input. It requires no assembly or additional software other than what you have already to create a piano out of bananas or a game controller made of Playdoh or buckets of water to name a few of the infinite possibilities. The project was fully funded last night after launching early on Monday. Hurry over to the site to learn more and place an order: http://makeymakey.com/

O’Reilly Books 50% Off 18 E-books This Weekend – It turns out this weekend is also when Maker Faire will be held in San Mateo, California. To celebrate, O’Reilly is discounting by 50% selected DRM-free ebooks on the topics of robots, sensors and science. Visit this link: http://j.mp/Klh5ys

Well thanks for sticking with this long message. I hope there’s something for everyone whether you can attend Scratch Day or not. See you soon!

Bill Tuk of OLPC-SF emailed to tell me about how, for years, he has been using a drop of water over the OLPC XO laptop camera aperture to convert it into a microscope. The technique saw a resurgence recently when Scientific American blogged about insect photographer Alexander Wild, who put a water drop on the iPhone 4 camera to make macroscopic photos. His sample photos of a flower, ant and dime look incredible.

Earlier today, with low expectations based on my past experiences with the low resolution, low contrast XO camera, I set an XO-1.75 beta machine (any XO laptop will work) with screen face up on my porch railing and dabbed a drop of tap water on the camera aperture window with a plastic drinking straw.

The preview in the Record activity went completely blurry, but unlike most any other laptop, I was still able to clearly see the activity screen in the bright afternoon sunlight. I had some random objects from my yard and kitchen. Holding a yellow 1×2 Lego brick in my fingers, I hovered it over the water drop. The letters LEGO burst onto the screen from the sunlit brick. The quality of the image was excellent for an XO. Some of my shots are in the collage above and in an annotated set on Flickr.

It is Bill’s wish that this simple, zero-cost technique become a standard learning exercise for all children who use XO laptops. Here are some tips he provided:

• Use a 1-inch square piece of clear plastic cellophane from a CD/DVD wrapper or cigarette pack to hold the water drop so that it can be kept centered over the camera aperture
• Manually focus by moving the object closer or further from the face-up XO camera
• Video can be taken as well (perhaps of a wiggling bug)
• Clean up the water with a tissue or towel

The clear plastic disc over the the XO camera is glued completely in place, so I just put my drop of water directly on without any problems. Even a small bottle of water will be enough to keep an entire class of XOs refreshed with water drops every 15 minutes for many hours of field exploration. The XO’s daylight readable screen makes it easy for the children to share their photos and reflect on them by taking notes and making sketches.

We’re hoping that water drops on XO laptop cameras will inspire millions of young Van Leeuwenhoeks around the world.

Here are some resources I found related to water drop magnifiers:

Historical information

Using clothespins for support

Water drop on an Android smartphone camera

Water drop on an iPhone 3G camera

Book: Single Lens: The Story of the Simple Microscope, Brian J. Ford, 1981

The OLPC Learning Club DC and Sugar Labs DC bring Scratch Day back this year at a new location. Mark your calendars for Saturday, May 19, 2012, 10am-2pm to be at:

Washington-Lee High School
1301 N Stafford St
Arlington, VA 22201

We’ll be in rooms 4207, 4209, and 4211 doing Scratch demos, tutorials and teacher certification. Check back in early May for updates.

I decided to try to duplicate the impressive no-battery solar panel test that Richard Smith and Chris Ball shot on video recently in Cambridge, MA.

I couldn’t get everything set up until 3:15 pm today here in Wheaton, MD (just north of Washington, D.C.), so the 10 watt OLPC panel wouldn’t power the batteryless XO-1.75 B1 laptop because the sun was too low. Skies were partly cloudy on this Sunday in winter.

Switching to a 20 watt HQRP panel with a charge controller, I was able to boot and run the laptop. I had to move the setup several times to dodge tree shadows as I’m in a wooded area. And the sun became too dim by 3:40 pm for the 20 watt panel to work at all.

Even though this test was with a larger panel than the OLPC standard, it’s still impressive that I can run the laptop in dim winter sunlight with no battery. The XO 3.0 tablet will have the same performance as it has a similar mother board.

Here are short video clips of booting up and surfing the web.

What: Family XO Meetup
When: Saturday, January 21, 2012, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center
in computer lab SAC 1211, Washington, D.C. 20002

The room may actually change, but we’ll post a sign. Let us know if you need help upgrading your XO laptop and we’ll be sure to bring a USB drive with the necessary files.

Thanks to a tip from Walter Bender, I discovered that wife Amy and I are featured in the new Cult of LEGO book from No Starch Press. My 2007 photo of Amy modeling a One Laptop per Child XO-1 laptop camera viewfinder made of LEGO bricks runs full bleed on page 41. The viewfinder is shown as an example of one of a wide variety of ingenious uses for LEGO bricks. The book itself is a broad survey of LEGO history, culture and fandom.

The Cult of LEGO is available in bookstores and online. No Starch Press offers an ebook or ebook/print bundle on their web site. The PDF ebook is pictured here on my iPad.

The LEGO viewfinder was discovered by design professor Phil Renato, who collaborated with me to create a custom design for 3D printing. We made a couple hundred of them for sale and gifting. The photo of Walter Bender looking through that viewfinder has been used far and wide. The viewfinder was even converted into a USB flash drive. Then Vik Olliver of RepRap fame came up with a simpler design that could be printed from an XO laptop to the DIY RepRap 3D printer.

My ongoing involvement with LEGO through the MIT Media Lab and the OLPC Learning Club of DC attracted a visit from producers of the LEGO Mindstorms Robotics products. I provided consulting on approaches to optimizing their low-cost WeDo robotics kit for the OLPC XO laptop. The discussions led to my introducing to LEGO the team of developers that did the port of the Win/Mac software to Linux that is now being deployed to 20,000 kids in Peru.

I’m looking forward to helping LEGO some more in 2012.

CC Flickr photo by Mike Lee

Scratch Day 2011
Saturday May 21, 2011, 1-4pm
Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive
Arlington, VA 22204
Contact Page, Google Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info

Our third annual Scratch Day will arrive this Saturday afternoon at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia. We’re reprising last year’s winning formula this year to run three concurrent hands-on workshops for teachers, parents and kids. The latest version of Scratch, the MIT Media Lab’s fabulous interactive authoring software, is installed in each of the computer labs. We also expect to be able to demonstrate Scratch 1.4 running on the OLPC XO-1 laptop with support for the built-in camera and the Journal file system.

Our special guest Michael Badger, author of Scratch 1.4: Beginner’s Guide, has graciously offered to return this year. Michael will help lead one of the workshops. His publisher, Packt Publishing, has generously sponsored our event again with copies of the book to raffle and book discount flyers. And we have a special raffle prize related to robotics!

Here is the event schedule:

The Scratch Team at MIT has produced some fun promotional videos.

Thanks again to Packt Publishing!

With speaking engagements and family travel for the rest of the Saturdays this month, I’ve decided not to have a formal user group meeting. Spring fever too! If anyone wants to have an informal meeting on a weeknight, I’m available the evening of Thursday, April 28th for a meet-up somewhere downtown. Wayan is pretty busy the rest of this month and then out of the country next, so we won’t be at the Looking Glass Lounge.

We will be meeting again next month on the afternoon of May 21 with the big bang of Scratch Day 2011 at the Arlington Career Center. There will be one or more blog posts and an email update coming before the event. We’re looking for volunteers to present workshops or projects as well as assist with setting up. Please contact Jeff Elkner jeff at elkner.net or Mike Lee curiouslee at gmail.com.

Illustration from the OLPC Tanzania wiki page.

A quick chat with Walter Bender last week reminded me we should do a meeting where we all share and discuss our favorite Sugar activities. There are so many hidden gems in the Sugar Activities web site and no end to tips and tricks for the universal favorites.

We’ll be back at the Arlington Career Center this Saturday afternoon:

Saturday, March 19, 2011, 1:30pm-4pm
Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive
Arlington, VA 22204
Contact Page, Google Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info

Bring your XO laptops and hopefully, we’ll be able to use our new LCD projection capability to demonstrate right from an XO laptop.

Lastly, our friends at iLoveMyXo.com are still running their 10% discount special for our club on single and four-pack 10 watt solar panels (while supplies last). These are OLPC-certified flexible resin panels with exact match power plug for both XO-1 and XO-1.5. Use the discount code xoSOLAR when ordering. In tests in strong mid-day summer sun here in Washington, D.C., this panel will charge an XO from empty to full in 3.5 to 4.5 hours.