One Laptop Per Child News

OLPC's Netbook Impact on Laptop PC Industry

2009-12-07T15:33:06Z

I will list the ways in which OLPC has influenced the target market which probably defines the interest of most readers of OLPC News, the angle from which most bloggers and industry commentators have been talking about the OLPC project for the past 4 years, which is how OLPC technology may affect the rich Western country's PC/Laptop industry.

Said in another way, how OLPC has influenced the whole bunch of adults in rich countries reading Engadget and Gizmodo egoistically thinking: "When can I buy and use this for myself". These are the PC/Laptop industry related developments of the last 4 years that we can thank OLPC for:

1. Windows XP would have been discontinued in 2007 or 2008 as was Microsoft's original plan. Every so often, Microsoft would release a new OS requiring more powerful hardware to even run the same apps, all being one scheme that Microsoft and Intel have been cooperating on for decades, to make it so that consumers would buy a new computer every 2-3 years or so. Wintel and the PC industry really needed Windows Vista to generate a whole lot of new revenues, profits and sale. But OLPC helped stop it and Windows XP is still for sale.

2. The Windows XP licence for netbooks was lowered to $30 per device. Until then, Microsoft had never licensed Windows for less than $60 per unit, even in bulk to OEM manufacturers. Microsoft has even declared that the Windows XP licence was to be only $3 in third world countries. All that thanks to the pressure from Linux OS in netbooks which was kick-started by the OLPC project.

3. Netbooks are selling at a rate of 35 million units per year and represent more than 30% of the notebook market and this share is increasing. It's pretty much indisputable that the whole Netbook market segment happened as a response to the disruptive OLPC project. Intel could simply not let the MIT sell a billion AMD Geode powered laptops.

If it weren't for the artificial restrictions imposed by Intel and Microsoft for the affordable licensing of Intel Atom and Windows XP netbook edition, on screen size, keyboard size, RAM, hard drive space, HDMI output, then the so-called (by Intel) netbook market would have been even much bigger, selling probably twice as many at this point and disrupting the notebook market even further.

Cause who can provide actual bill of material to argue that 12.1" or 13.3" screens, larger keyboards, HDMI output should cost that much more that it should not be allowed to be categorized with the inferior "netbooks"? The fact is Intel and Microsoft are very careful trying to limit the success of the netbooks.

4. Intel's profits shrank 90% between Q4 2007 and Q4 2008. Intel is making much lower profit margins on netbooks than they ever have.

5. Google is now planning the Chrome OS. Educated from the netbooks, the demand from the mass consumer market has now definitely shifted from performance and bloat, towards just asking to have the bare minimum. Google is seeing the convergence of market trends and are as a result building a very optimized OS to boot in 5 seconds and run on $50 ARM powered laptops.

OLPC has thus influenced the mass consumer and geek markets of rich countries in all these ways. But I do think OLPC has still a long way to go in the coming months to influence the industry even more.

OLPC's Future Impact on the PC Industry

The next influences by OLPC on the industry will have to be opening up the Netbook market to X86 alternatives to Intel Atom. With XO-1.5, OLPC is making of VIA a usable alternative to Intel's near monopoly. Competition in the X86 netbook market will help lower prices more rapidly.

In addition, OLPC will need to make ARM Laptops as good as X86 ones for web browsing and basic applications. With XO-1.75, OLPC is going to make the PC/Laptop industry realize that there is an alternative to X86 for full sized keyboard/screen computing.

The ARM alternative is not only about lower power consumption, smaller size and weight, it is most importantly about a different architecture which ARM is licensing to several semi-conductor makers, among Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Freescale, Marvell, Broadcom, Nvidia, Samsung and others.

All those competitors in the ARM based platform manufacture, means that prices will be lowered even that much faster than with X86, where Intel alone can basically dictate prices regardless of the actual cost of manufacture and regardless of Moore's law, which states that a Laptop cost should nearly be halved every 18 months when keeping it at the same performance and power consumption.

OLPC could demonstrate that an XO can be ARM powered and perform just as well for the basic tasks that XO laptops need to perform.

All these western geek market aspects do matter for the IT based plans for the better education of children, since the OLPC project is all about sourcing those laptops to the children, so prices and market trends obviously do matter for the education aspect of the OLPC project.

This is the first installment of Charbax's two-part response to "What Have We Learned From OLPC? Have your own answer? Submit it as a Guest Post today!

Shocking OLPC Haiti Pilot Project Report From IADB

2009-12-07T15:07:01Z

When the IDB plans to "evaluate its performance from a quantitative standpoint," it's a good sign that they mean to do just that. The XO project in Haiti, discussed here with a cost breakdown here is bearing a ton (1 pages, to be precise) fruit, with the recent IDB report (PDF).

It reveals some promise, some best practices, and also reminds us of some common problems.

From the "I toldya so" files

Finding an XO laptop spark

Somewhat unsurprisingly, there were some hassles in the basic deployment and daily use of the XOs which have been common topics of debate around OLPCNews.com for some time now, from dealing with shipping, hardware and infrastructure limitations, and the importance of teacher training.

First, classroom usage in the Haiti project started out as laptop sharing among students due to "an unforeseen shortage," later explained with slightly more detail as "logistical barriers and shipping delays"). The project team made lemonade from these lemons and studied the sharing dynamic, concluding that students more comfortable with the laptop and/or students who already had an stronger academic skills tended to dominate laptop usage; furthering the educational divide.

Green and Cute does not mean Safe

The strong branding of the laptop, ideally destroying the market for stolen XOs may or may not work as a theft deterrent, but most of the Haitian children aren't willing to gamble with theirs: "However, more than half of the fourth-grade students interviewed reported feeling afraid to take the XO laptop home because they might be robbed."

Battery life correlates with attention span:

The evaluation also found great variation in student attention span per XO Camp session, with a rising attention span from 9:00 am until approximately 10:30 am, and declining attention span thereafter. One of the explanations for this variation, as provided by observational data, was the low battery life of the XO laptops, which led to student fights over electrical outlets at approximately 10:30 am.

The actual problem then is not some mysterious mid-morning-onset Attention Deficit Disorder, but the real-world impacts of the reality of the XO battery life. It's great in black-and-white screen mode with wifi off and being used mainly for reading, but in real-life classroom situations; "the fully charged batteries were depleted within 3-5 hours, depending on usage. It is unclear whether this significant difference is attributable solely to a technical default or if the XO laptops were distributed without first being properly charged."

Even when working in a constructivist paradigm, teacher involvement and training helps:

School and MENFP staff also commented on the limits of constructivist pedagogy within the framework of the OLPC pre-pilot project... 42 percent believed that teachers and students were simply not used to a constructivist model of education and needed additional guidance to ensure its success. However, 100 percent of school and MENFP staff interviewees believed that the constructivist model was a good one to follow.

Clearly, however, the path from rote memorization to a more exploratory framework still had some ground to cover, based on not only the above sentiments, but some choice student quotes like "When I use it, I'll understand what I'm working on much better, which will make it easier to memorize."

Haiti also reveals a valuable role for constructivist style, student-led learning in low-resource environments:

Particularly in settings of extreme poverty, where educational materials and resources are scant and teacher quality is lacking, the implementation of child-centered learning can increase students' ability to think independently and to develop problem-solving skills more rapidly. Technology that is explicitly child-centered and designed for individual use has the potential of accelerating educational development in the short term.

The question remains, though, where (if ever?) does that change? With unlimited funds, few would argue that better trained teachers and high-quality teaching materials would not be the best path to improve education, but in the vast middle ground, at what level is do you throw in the towel, and stop focusing on teachers and start finding other tools to improve education?

Training and Localization

Project recommendations focused on training - both technical and pedagogical training for the teachers, including more training on constructivism, with other recommendations towards safety, methodology, and ideas to deal with the power problems.

Some insightful recommendations from the teachers themselves include some of the hardware hassles OLPCNews.com readers will be familiar with (*cough*touchpad*cough*), some clear UI improvements that more recent software updates have begun to address, and (mainly) localization challenges:

Include a map of Haiti. Include a game in which sentences appear out of order, thus requiring students to arrange the words in proper order. Include the Cut, Copy, and Paste features typically available on computers. Improve the touchpad, which quickly loses sensitivity and proved difficult for students and staff to use effectively. Include a longer-lasting battery, since the current battery lasts only about 2 hours. Include activities specific to Haitian culture. For example, when teaching about science, it would be useful to have an XO laptop activity that compared the traditional or natural medicines of several countries, including Haiti.

Some Good News

Haitian kids ♥ XO laptops

The software was not a problem - core Sugar Activities like Record, Write, Browse and Paint were well woven into curricula and represented the vast majority of classroom usage. Students would explore the other programs, but this exploration declined when activities were used in class. Also, introduction to the Internet "drastically reduced usage of the Paint and Record programs after being formally introduced to the Internet and receiving an essay-writing assignment." If you think that's a steep drop off, just wait till you show them Facebook, Twitter, and LOLCATS.

The decline in exploration is unfortunate, but could indicate student comfort and expertise levels increasing in programs they use more often. I certainly am a bigger fan of Excel than Access, and Photoshop more than MSPaint:

"when a clear activity was presented to the students and the students were given projects to work on using specific software programs, use of those programs increased steadily, while exploratory usage declined."

Actual skill and teaching improvements

The role of technology - and how to evaluate it - is the topic of lively debate. The Haiti OLPC project team did an impressive job gathering a mixture of hard numbers, survey responses and basic observations. Even so, educational progress with the laptop remains hard to measure. Some high points were clear improvement in spelling (possibly thanks in part to spellcheck) and improved writing (perhaps simply a better tool to write with?).

Regardless, there were clear process improvements for teachers:

Students wrote daily journal entries on the XO laptop. Like their written assignments, these were edited by the teachers. During interviews, most teachers said it was easier to edit students' work done on the XO laptop. Thus they were able to spend more time working one-on-one with students and less time lecturing. Increased individual attention may have thus been a significant factor in the perceived improvement of student's reading and writing skills.

Still, the potential value was best stated by the students themselves:

Students believed the XO laptop could be used to facilitate the learning process through the use of tools such as the Internet and a calculator because, as student #40 stated, "Everything you need is on the laptop."

Well, almost everything.

Read more OLPC classroom reports - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter

Apple Tablet To Use OLPC Screen Technology?!

2009-12-04T14:00:19Z

Have you ever played the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon with OLPC team members? I think you could make the case that OLPC is the center of the technology world - Nicholas Negroponte would get you pretty far, himself.

But rather than the whole technology universe, what about an Apple - OLPC link? We already know there is a 1 degree of separation between Negroponte and Steve Jobs - Jobs offered OSX for the OLPC before Negroponte turned him down. The Digital Life says it was more than just one event though. They quote Negroponte saying:

"I got an email from Steve Jobs (the night the laptop was revealed) he said you can't build it for a hundred dollars, and my answer was oh yes I can," Negroponte said as part of a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Thursday night. "He was actually a very good critic, and each time we got to a point, I did talk to him,"

OMFG - This would be hot!

And we all know that Ivan Kristic of Bitfrost fame, left OLPC and now works at Apple. But what about Apple folks at OLPC? Or more to the point, OLPC spin-offs? On this the Digital Lifestyle conjectures a hot idea OLPC's screen technology in the Apple Tablet:

Mary Lou Jepsen, former OLPC chief technology officer who has since left to form Pixel Qi, a company founded to commercialize the same revolutionary [OLPC] display technology. Pixel Qi's VP of Engineering is none other than Dr. Carlin Vieri who came to Pixel Qi from Apple, where according to his bio on the company site, "he engineered new generation display electronics for the iPhone and other devices."

See how we're connecting the dots? We wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see Pixel Qi acquired by Apple just around the same time as the tablet is announced. No need to clue the competition to your display choice early. It would be similar to Apple's acquisition of Fingerworks just before multitouch at Apple took off.

Personally, I would be surprised. Dancing around my home office screaming "Hell's Yes! That's clock stopping hot, baby!" surprised. But that's just me. The rest of y'all would freak when Steve Jobs made the tablet use Aquatic Sugar.

What Have We Learned from OLPC?

2009-12-03T15:02:49Z

Four years ago, Nicholas Negroponte introduced the world to the "One Laptop Per Child" idea at WSIS by showing off a "$100 laptop" with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The educational and technology fields haven't been the same since.

More than photos of XO + kids - impact

First, by the end of 2009 OLPC should pass a stunning milestone - 1 million XO laptops deployed in over 40 countries around the world, almost all in 1:1 computer to child ratios.

From full saturation in Uruguay and Peru, potentially high saturation in Rwanda, and multiple smaller deployments in almost every developing country, OLPC's one computer per child educational model is having a tremendous impact on educators and students.

Next, the humble XO laptop which was once ridiculed by the titans of technology, spawned the netbook. And the netbook is eating the computer market at a stunning growth rate. From essentially $0 sales in 2nd Quarter 2007 to $3 billion in sales - 20% of the entire portable computer market - in 2nd Quarter of 2009, netbook sales show no signs of slowing.

But OLPC has impact deeper and farther than just XO's passed out or netbooks snapped up. Its changing education, technology, even culture in ways beyond anyone's expectations.

So for the month of December, look for posts about OLPC impact in two forums:

OLPC News
We'll have a Guest Posts on OLPC News all month long around OLPC impact.
Sumbit a Guest Post today!

Educational Technology Debate
This month's conversation is focused just on what we've learned from OLPC.
Join the EduTechDebate now!

Related Links

What Do We Know About OLPC Pilots Worldwide? - OLPC News
What have we learned from OLPC pilots to date? - EduTech Blog
OLPC Academic papers - OLPC Wiki

10,000 XO Laptops to Mali via OLPC Europe

2009-12-02T15:08:26Z

Are you wondering the progress of One Laptop Per Child in Mali, West Africa? Well according to Walter De Brouwer, OLPC Europe found a Swiss sponsor to donate 10,000 laptops to Mali, and will begin a deployment in the region of Timbuktu this December:

Happy for future XO's

"We're starting a big project in Mali, where there are 10,000 kids with nothing," he said. "We're not just selling them a laptop, together with the Government we've electrified the schools; we see that teachers are trained and that classes go down from 100 kids to 40. It's a laptop project and an education project, but it's becoming a transformation project, because the aim is to transform a society."

According to Nathalie Avidar of OLPC Europe, the initial order for a pilot of this kind with between 10,000-12,000 laptops costs between US$2-2.4 million. This sum covers the machines and the training of all the relevant personnel and 1% of the purchase price covers repair or replacement of machines in event of major failures.

But what about OLPC Mali - the Laptop Magazine financed pilot project that showed XO laptops could make a difference in Mali? Apparently, OLPC Europe isn't working with them directly anymore. They're tossing aside these experienced implementers after getting their connections and capitalizing on their good will.

While that would really piss me off, Salimata of OLPC Mali has a larger vision:

In all honesty, I am very happy and thrilled that OLPC is finally deploying in Mali. This is what I have worked so hard for, and I am proud of myself for making it happen. OLPC is about children getting laptops in their hands and enhancing their learning process and experience with it, and they deserve it.

May we all remember this when we're working on bringing XO laptops to children. Its not about grandstanding in front of press or presidents - its about the children. And Mali's children deserve the best we can give them.

Stay current with OLPC in Mali - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter

How to Fix Bricked G1G1 XO Laptops Automatically

2009-12-01T15:40:12Z

I've been getting increasing numbers of requests from donors in the first OLPC Give 1 Get 1, many of whom are just getting around to opening their XOs, to have their laptops repaired.

As is now widely known, due to a manufacturing glitch the first few batches of OLPC XO-1s that were shipped to consumers had a faulty motherboard battery holder. This alone wouldn't be a problem, if only two other things hadn't happened at the same time:

The XO-1s were shipped with Open Firmware's security enabled. This caused them to have the same anti-theft protection as laptops deployed in the third world, without any of the benefits of a remote killswitch or tracking
The XO-1s had a version of OFW which would fail to boot when the clock was below a certain value

The above two issues combined with the manufacturing fault was a recipe for disaster. Owners who discovered this in the first 30 days were able to get a RMA and a working laptop, but OLPC lacked the resources to support those outside of this minimal warranty.

Wanted: a XO heartbeat

I've been running an OLPC repair center, OLPC DC Repair, (charging only minimal fees for labor and shipping) since mid-2008, and have handled dozens of these "unbricking" problems.

The procedure for repairing the above is straightforward and well documented. However, it can be tedious, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the tools involved. Since I needed the programming practice anyway, I decided to write a rudimentary Python script to automate the process.

Thus enters d6.py

d6.py makes it (hopefully) amazingly simple to unbrick your XO, so that you can get up and running as soon as possible. You can clone the git repo, or download it directly (permalink).

To download and run in a single command:

python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen
('http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/olpc-contrib/tree/d6.py').read();

Plug in your OLPC Serial Adapter (or one of the compatible alternatives), and run the script as a user which has access to /dev/ttyUSB0 (or as root, not recommended) or change the path inside the script to something suitable to your system.

This script is in the alpha state, is poorly documented, and may not handle all edge cases (read: other people's systems) well. I'm not responsible if it kills your cat, lights your XO on fire, or makes your wife leave you, but hopefully it'll be of some use. Expect a GUI shortly.

Limitations:

Does not handle all error conditions
No command line params
Hard-coded path to serial adapter

Therefore, the code does not run on other platforms other than Linux. You might also encounter problems if you're running it on a system with brltty installed, removing it should fix the conflict.

Feedback is more than welcome in the comments. If you don't have an OLPC-compatible serial adapter, or have other hardware problems with your XO, you can contact the OLPC DC Repair center, which serves the US and Canada

Luke Faraone is an OLPC volunteer and has graciously allowed us to republished "Fix bricked XOs automatically" here with his permission.

Leverage Afghan Children: More XO Laptops, Not Troops

2009-11-30T15:08:54Z

A recent editorial in the New York Times, "More Schools, Not Troops" suggested that instead of sending 40,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, we could build thousands of schools there.

Empowering girls' education

"For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there."

Building schools is a great idea but is a long term project and should be done by the Afghans themselves, albeit with outside help. I feel direct distribution of educational materials to children would offer a quicker and possibly greater impact.

Such a program would, as Nicholas Negroponte says, "leverage the children", to teach themselves in a country that lacks teachers and schools. I suggest that the distribution be in three stages:

Stage 1. A backpack containing inexpensive items, such as paper, pencils, crayons, ruler, calculator, hand lens, etc.
Stage 2. A solar lantern for power and so that kids can work after dark. An example lantern is the "d.light" which has a solar panel and can also charge mobile phones.
Stage 3. XO laptop.

Using a staged approach, by the time kids receive laptops, their parents will be interested and feel that the program is not some CIA conspiracy but a genuine desire to help. I'm guessing that the backpack would cost $20, the lantern $30, and the laptop $100. Distribution costs might be $100, making the total cost per kid about $250. So the comparison is between one soldier, 20 schools, or 1000 education kits.

I have some questions about this idea that OLPC News readers might be able to answer:

The solar panel should be able to charge the laptop as well as the lantern but the d.light web page does not provide enough detail to tell if it does. Maybe a more expensive system is required.
Can the Measure Activity on the laptop monitor and plot solar panel voltage (i.e., solar radiation) and battery charge, with data points say, every 10 minutes? This could help keep the battery charged as well as teach a bit of electricity, meteorology, and graphics.
Can the XO come with prepackaged hardcopies of Wikipedia and Google Maps to mimic an encyclopedia and world atlas? How many books can be stored in a laptop? The laptop should remain useful by itself, without wi-fi communications if it is stolen, smuggled, or whatever.
What should be the order of distribution? Obviously the Afghan government should decide this but here are some ideas.

Every kid in the country should get a backpack as soon as possible to provide some quick results and publicity for the program. Then lanterns and last, laptops. Start with schools that already have laptops, then urban schools, and finally rural areas. Maybe some city kids could become teachers in rural areas.

If the older kids get laptops before the young ones, they will be able to help teach the younger ones and also be less likely to steal laptops.

Douglas McLain, at 71 years old, is becoming a grouchy old man.

Who are the key OLPC Twitter people?

2009-11-27T21:00:50Z

Twitter is an amazing medium for real time communications. We scan Twitter every day for comments about OLPC, and respond to all those we find relevant to the one laptop per child movement via:

OLPC News on Twitter

In fact, we've even created our own OLPC Twitter List of all those that are key to XO laptop development and usage expansion. But are we missing someone?

Who should be added as key OLPC Twitter people? Maybe you? Let us know either in the comments below or @OLPCNews

OLPC Black Friday Shopping for XO-mas

2009-11-26T15:11:27Z

I would love to announce that One Laptop Per Child has restarted the Give One Get One program of years before, but sadly, you can only Give One on Amazon.com. But there are still good Black Friday Deals on XO-ish things. Amazon has netbooks on sale for those who want to shop for new computers.

Over on eBay, you can still buy XO laptops, some in their original packaging. But if you already have an XO-1, and you're holding out for an XO-1.5, you can always go Constructionist while you wait with these three books:

Personally, I'll be re-watching my favorite TV show: 60 Minutes - One Laptop Per Child.

Donate Your Unloved XO Laptops to Lubuto Library

2009-11-25T15:14:08Z

The Lubuto Library Project builds beautiful, indigenously-styled open-access libraries that serve street children and other vulnerable and out-of-school children in sub-Saharan African countries, starting in Zambia.

The libraries, owned and run by Zambians, offer a wide array of programs, including mentoring and use of OLPC XO laptops, that provide the children with a bridge to schools and social services that are beyond the reach of vast numbers of them.

We successfully introduced 10 XO's at the first Lubuto Library, in Lusaka, Zambia, in February, 2009 - see XO Empowered Street Children at Lubuto Library - and they have been in almost constant use ever since:

We are now completing our second library, in another part of Lusaka where there are many street children needing services, and we would like to provide as many of the XO laptops as we can get. The former street children who work with our libraries are adept in training, and we can assure you that the laptops will be heavily used and appreciated for as long as they last by some of the most vulnerable children on the planet.

Your donation of a laptop is tax-deductible and we will immediately send a receipt with our thanks. You cancontact us here.

Jane Meyers is president of the Lubuto Library Project, Inc.

Reorganizing the One Laptop Per Child Dream Team

2009-11-24T15:19:06Z

OLPC is restructuring. This time quietly, which at least doesn't start up the storm we had in January, but even slow news are important news, as they add up.

It was already public knowledge that the Learning Team is gone to Rwanda, for good. Nicholas Negroponte quipped to me during the IADB Seminar, saying that I "wouldn't have to see [David] Cavallo any more". (I actually liked David the time we met personally, but that's off the point).

President, One Laptop Per Child Assoc

We also had announced already that Sales went to Miami, no longer connected with Brightstar. While I personally hate to lose the connection with Marcelo Claure, someone also born in Bolivia, I'm sure there were reasons for that change.

Now, Rodrigo Arboleda, until recently OLPC President and CEO, Ibero-America & The Caribbean, dunks the geography verbiage and now is President, One Laptop Per Child ("OLPC"), taking over not just sales but operations responsibility for the whole OLPC Association, from Miami.

Dr. Negroponte will be focusing more specifically on future development (a.k.a. XO #?).
Chuck Kane stays as President of the OLPC Foundation, operating from the 1CC Boston headquarters.

More minor changes that do make a big difference: Adam Holt has a more definite and stable role to keep the community alive, SJ Klein is still sort of with us or maybe not quite while being one of the topmost to-go guys at Wikimedia.

I wish he had been able to do what he proposes for Wikimedia while he was with us, like open meetings and soliciting public input. Sean Daly is not quite a hire apparently, but he seems to be turning into a sort of a credible public spokesman for the project within the community, something we sorely needed.

We've seen some people go, in a less stressful way than what happened in January. We will miss dogi and isforinsects. They did a good job, and I for one learned a lot from them.

Will a new Global Advocacy Group for OLPC be based in Washington DC? While it is possible there will be some commuting, as Matt Keller is located in Cambridge, there might be interesting action to follow up in DC besides the McCain endorsement. Who knows, maybe even money will flow!

Alas, the message OLPC proposes doesn't seem to be yet aligned with the one that comes from major funding sources, mostly because it still falls short of a specific and definite focus for curricular content and support of classroom work.

An interesting page to keep an eye on is Jobs at laptop.org. The only change in a few months has been the interest in Middle East education. Anyway, some of those job offers never got anyone hired, so take the page as an indicator of trends rather than an up to date or otherwise accurate source. Notice the several offers for the soon to be finished XO-1.5. A cached version.

(full disclosure: the above is a compilation of an observation of trends and likely events, but may not be fully accurate, since it is so hard to get actual information on the goings-on at 1CC - I again requested to talk with them to check on facts, so far no answer)

Know what's happening with OLPC - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter

Powerful Ideas in Sugar Learning Platform

2009-11-23T14:54:08Z

The Sugar software for the OLPC XO (and, with Sugar on a Stick, for almost any other recent computer with an x86 processor) is based in part on Seymour Papert's educational classic, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.

Sharp tools for young minds

One of those Powerful Ideas is to provide Sharp Tools, as opposed to the weak idea of canned lessons on individual topics that go no further. They were originally designed for the factory automation model of education.

You know, everybody in an entire state or country gets the same lesson from the same textbook on the same day. Efficiency! Except when some students don't get a particular lesson, and there is no provision for helping them to catch up.

We still have to offer lessons on the same day for everybody in the same classroom, but we aren't confined to a single textbook, or even the same information on the same topic within a lesson. For example, the lesson may be for a class to go out on the Internet, and for each student to find different information that relates to a topic, and combine the various discoveries. Ivan Krstić mentioned this strategy as one of the first that teachers discovered in Peru.

Another powerful idea is to replace printed textbooks with media and software under Free Licenses such as GPL (GNU Public License) or Creative Commons, as California has begun to do with PDFs of textbooks. But we can go further that that. We can use Sugar tools to create models in math and science. We can use the XO for data acquisition, using Measure and Record, the digital oscilloscope and camera, and we can use the math capabilities of Sugar software to analyze the data. We can help children explore the vast realms of art, music, and literature. But how do we get children to that level?

We have another powerful idea for that: to design software to make it as easy as possible to get started, and to have as few obstacles as possible along the way to using creative tools. This is called Low Floor, No Ceiling. Arithmetic is presented in the schools with a low ceiling, but math in general has no limits. I don't just mean the arcane math that professionals like my brother Gregory work on. (He's a Professor at Rutgers.) I mean math that is easy, interesting, fun, and useful. You may not have heard of such math if you just went through the usual grade school courses, or even college math for non-majors, but I can assure you it exists, and I can point to lots.

For today, I will just make one suggestion. Suppose we taught probability and statistics in terms of baseball batting averages and record performances and the like. How many US children would hate that? It would work for some other countries, such as the Dominican Republic and Japan, where baseball is huge. The rest of the world prefers soccer (football, futbol) or in some cases cricket. It can be curling or chess if that's what floats any children's boats (or rowing, in that case). Can you imagine a generation of children growing up knowing when politicians are abusing statistics?

Starting with Sugar

But, to get back to the beginning, where can children start? All of Sugar is designed to be discoverable where possible. It turns out that there are a few elementary points that cannot readily be discovered, which I have listed on the Sugarlabs Wiki on a page called The Undiscoverable.

Mousing with a touch pad, and left-clicking (X button on the XO), right-clicking, (O button), and click-and-drag are so familiar to seasoned laptop users that they may seem obvious, but to little children they are definitely not. Clicking buttons has to come before menus, launching Activities, and the rest, but after opening the XO and turning it on. Click and drag is essential a little later, for moving and resizing things within Activities, and for making selections in graphics software.

There are also large realms that few children can explore without guidance, such as art, music, math, science, programming, writing...and sharp tools for each that let you explore all of recorded and written music, etc.

So we need to have properly sequenced lessons on the specific beginning points in Sugar, and we have to think about how far we have to guide children before they can effectively explore larger realms on their own. The best existing example of a Low Floor is the set of Tutorial Projects in Etoys displayed on the opening Etoys screen.

One is presented as a game of exploring the Demon Castle, where the learner has to find and change keys to open successive doors. Each of the changes corresponds to a control in the tool halo of an object, such as resizing, rotation, or duplication. This gives the learner a basic grasp of the tools provided.

The second tutorial, Etoys Challenge, is a simple programming challenge. Given an object, in this case a car, get it from the starting point to a designated ending point by controlling the car's path directly, or having it react to obstacles. All of the needed commands are provided on the screen, and the learner just has to determine how to fit them together to specify the desired behavior.

Squeakland has further tutorials on how to modify existing objects and projects and create new ones. We should bring those into Sugar.

The fourth level is provided in a library of projects that students can try out, examine, and modify as they like, as soon as they know how, and in Free books on Smalltalk programming.

Then we only need 10,000 more topics done up with software, media, and lesson plans, in more than 100 languages, to cover every idea in every school subject for every grade. But once the children get started, they will be telling us how to do that, and will in some cases create better lessons than we adults can do from far away, with no idea what problems the children in a particular community need to be educated to solve.

Then we can get the children out on the Net to talk to each other, and to the rest of us. This will be fun. Anybody who wants can have a billion nieces and nephews crowding around to tell stories and show off their work. Is that a powerful idea or what?

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Saturday: OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009

2009-11-20T21:30:05Z

Come out this Saturday to OLPC events in New Your City, or San Francisco. Here in the Bay Area, we'll have the OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009 - a OLPC-SF community event designed to primarily foster collaboration amongst deployment teams in the SF Bay Area. We also hope that the event will help in improving the visibility of OLPC and Sugar to a wider group around this area.

The event is a "Birds of a Feather" type event but largely run as an unconference. Open to everyone. Drop by, and join a session. Bring a friend. Bring your family too!

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 (whole day)
SFSU Downtown Campus at #553,
835 Market Street, San Francisco

Sessions include:

Stacey Kertsman. (eduWeavers) "XO for teaching and learning."
Education track. Room 553
Sameer Verma. (SFSU) "Moodle and the School Server". Technology track. Room 554
Humaira Mahi (SFSU) and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA). "Women, health literacy and empowerment". Outreach track. Room 553
Bruce Baikie. (Green Wifi) "Senegal - Deployment lessons and moving forward in 2010" Education Track. Room 554
Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury). "Teaching Python in schools". Technology track. Room 597
Alex Kleider (Madagascar). "School Server installation and configuration". Technology track. Room 553
Christian Nobs and Ted Kuster (Starr King). "Kid Camp: Discover by doing - Hands-on experience with XO activities for children". Outreach track. Room 554
Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury) and Sameer Verma (SFSU). "Sugar on the XO, Sugar on a Stick, Sugar in the Lab, Sugar Everywhere!". Technology Track. Room 597
Joachim Pedersen. (OLPC-SF Repair Center), June Kleider (Madagascar) and Anil Daswani (Support Gang). "Repairing and supporting XOs in the field." Technology track. Room 553

A Laptop in Every American Backpack

2009-11-20T15:03:40Z

Editors Note: This article by Alec Ross and Simon Rosenberg, is one of NDN's Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills first published in May 2007. Its introduction is republished here to remind us of an American need for one laptop per child. Read the full article here.

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century.

Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

USA school kids exploring IT

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world. We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success.

There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

This paper offers thoughts on one piece of this commitment - how we best bring the power of this network to America's schoolchildren. Achieving the American Dream in this century increasingly requires fluency in the ways of this network and its tools - how to acquire information and do research, how to construct reports and present ideas using these new tools, how to type and even edit video.

We believe we need a profound and urgent national commitment to give this powerful new 21st knowledge, essential for success in this century, to all American school children. We believe that America needs to put a laptop in every backpack of every child. We need to commit to a date and grade certain: we suggest 2010 for every sixth grader.

These laptops need to be wirelessly connected to the Internet, and children need to be able to take them home. Local school districts should choose how best to do this, but there needs to be federal funding and simple, federal standards. Funds and strategies for how training our teachers to lead this transformation need to be part this commitment.

We believe it will cost at first $2 billion a year to provide every 6th grader a laptop, about what we spend in Iraq every week. Hardware costs continue to plummet each year, and the idea of a $200 laptop or classmate PC is coming ever closer to reality. It is not a question of resources, but of vision and political will. Libya has just announced a national commitment to give all its school children a laptop. If Libya can do it, so can America.

Giving our children the tools for computer literacy is the 21st century equivalent to teaching them how to read. In the "flat world" described by Tom Friedman, there can be no life success without it this knowledge, no real chance to seize the American Dream, no secure and prosperous road to the middle class. We believe giving every school child a laptop must be an essential part of any strategy to ensure broad-based prosperity for America in the 21st century.

So, let's look at what it might require to put a laptop in every backpack.

SugarLabs: Sugar-sweet or Sugar-coated?

2009-11-19T15:30:18Z

SugarLabs "evolved" from OLPC with a wider goal to provide an instructionist GIU and computer learning environment for elementary school age kids all over the world.

It's engineering goals call for a (Linux) OS and hardware-agnostic platform, with transparent, free and readily accessible and modifiable code that can be also easily shared among users. The normal user has absolute control over the Sugar part but the core system remains secure from malicious activities.

One aspect that was explicitly stated in the OLPC project but is not even suggested by SugarLabs is environmental concern and energy (code) efficiency. The other aspect that was not addressed either by OLPC or SugarLabs is if free and accessible implies "as long as you do it a certain way".

With SugarLabs maturing and Sugar approaching its 1.0 version I think it worths taking a look at some of these trying to minimize prerequisites and established practices, and see a) if all these are feasible b) if the implemented approaches can achieve them and c) at what cost.

I'm obviously not offering an expert opinion, but rather trying to bring up some issues for (re)consideration. Experience shows that evolutions of goals and ideas tend to curry a lot of the previous practices and components that can actually trouble your progress down the road. I'm not necessarily suggesting to redesign Sugar, but rather (in Linux terms) to (re)define the tree and do an extensive garbage collection.

One GUI?

Although the age-target group of Sugar is not rigidly defined and is ranging for 6 to 16, let's stay with the Uruguay paradigm and say elementary school kids. So the first obvious question is if ANY GUI can be equally appropriate for a 1st grader that can not read and hardly have the motor skills to use a computer and a 6th grader that may blind-type and use keyboard shortcuts because the mouse slows him/her down?

The second obvious question is, given the diversity in kids development/aptitude, if for any given age/class there is a minimal common ability denominator to be based on? If yes, is this "common denominator" sufficient to build a GUI around and is this "common denominator"-based GUI will actually be any good to anyone?

And the third obvious question is how any given GUI can be cross-caltural without imposing a "cultural imperialism"?

Linux is trying to address these issues in the adult world by providing a multiple of highly configurable desktop environments. OLPC on the other hand provides both Sugar and GNOME trying to satisfy both young and older kids.

Sugar must become more configurable too. From plane icons and no text to two-level deep drop-down menus and everything in between if possible. Maybe in a fashion similar to the frame delay selection or the universal access mode. This would allow different user abilities and preferences to be implemented/accommodated.

It is not reasonable to believe that "one size can fits all" and if you do also to believe that this is going to be looking good on anyone too! But how do you decide which one is the best for any given age/ability group? There is only one way. Test with the given target groups!

Also decide what is you "user satisfaction goal" for your given effort/abilities. Going for 100% may end up in a monster structure. I believe that 51% is a good initial goal. Anything above that should be considered on a cost/benefit base.
Talking about garbage collection, may want to reconsider some OLPC XO-1 relics (eg low specs) like the luck of color. Children above all, should not live in a "grey world".

However, for all these to be successfully implemented I guess that the GUI itself should be build in a modular and easily configurable way. Similar to the activities. Components should be added and removed without affecting the remaining parts. I do not know how feasible this may be but modularity and customization are going hand to hand.

The additional benefit of modularity is that it may be adapted to a wider hardware abilities and satisfy user choices like responsiveness over features. I can appreciate that this may generate a havoc with activity building, but to the extend that clear APIs and instructions are there, you can only hope that developers will follow suit. The alternative is "one size-fits-all" and even worse, every change breaks compatibility with pervious builds/apps and introduces a cycle of debugging/rebuilding.

Only (one) Interpreted Language(s)?

From the beginning OLPC and later SugarLabs made one fundamental choice. Sugar code should be _readily_ available to and modifiable by the user. This was translated to "try to do everything in python" that was taken a step further, I guess also because of the XO-1 space limitations, to "do not use/keep python compiled binaries" (the .pyc files).

Python may be great but the specific implementation introduced a major burden in lowspecs hardware, increased energy consumption (CPU cycles), wasted time (multiply few minutes of waiting per day with millions of users) and frustration (patient is not a characteristic of young age).

The argument is that this option increases programming literacy and freedom. However, if nothing else Sugar already has plenty of programming applications including Python. If the need for seeing and modifying application code arises (not the most common need for 7-12 year old) you can have source code provided with all apps.

The issue of limited storage space could be taken care by the School server or the internet that could keep and distribute source code files on demand. Will be some delay and the (non functioning) "view source" button will not work, but comparing to the overall delays introduced by the current scheme the choice should be clear.

But python has run-time code evaluation, someone will argue. True, but this is a convenience for the developers mostly (if not only). Them doing their work faster/easier and everybody else paying the bloat/delay price can hardly be an "educational" justification. But python looks like real spoken language. True, but other languages do it and some without the bloat. What about gnome's newer addition, Genie? Python-like syntax, no VM under, no 10 layers to get to processor, use of existing libraries, C-like performance. Should it be "banned" from Sugar?

The multiple programming language/binary packages approach on the other hand will:

allow the most appropriate language to be implemented for any given task,
attract/utilize developers with different programming skills,
allow easier use/adaptation of existing apps without reinventing the wheel for everything
increase program execution speed and efficiency
allow exposure/teaching of multiple programming language instead of just one
teach a mainstream programing skill eg compile/debug apps from source
improve compatibility/distribution with other linux distros.

I certainly do not suggest to rewrite Sugar from scratch. It could start with always keeping and using the .pyc files (as it is done for some core elements and indeed many activities lately in Sugar 0.84+) and open the door to other language and the binary/source code scheme. Allow the use of non-python languages (maybe with a python wrapper if needed) for now and encourage more energy efficient languages for the future.

I can imagine that this may create other technical/operating problems but this approach is something that has been used and solved in most of the standard linux distributions (including the Fedora core mostly used by SugarLabs) that utilize packages written in all sort of languages.

Mavrothal as this question first on OLPC News Forum

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