[math4] RIT and the Fedora Developers XO Program

[Karlie Robinson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Fwd: Fedora Developers XO program]
Date: 	Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:41:33 -0500
From: 	Stephen Jacobs
To: 	Karlie Robinson
CC: 	David Nalley, Mel Chua



Ok folks,

We had our 2nd OLPC group meeting tonight and the group is interested in
helping the math curriculum work move forward.  I will dedicate my course to
doing the same.

The course is 90% a go.  It's a little light on students at the moment due
to some red tape issues here but I've been told it should run despite a
little under-registration.  First day of class is 3/13 and it ends 5/14.
Class will meet physically once a week in a class room once a week on
fridays and teams will meet with each other, members of the local group
and/or the larger development community a couple hours a week as well.
They'll also attend the local OLPC group meetings twice during the run of
the class.  If things go well it'll be co-taught by my lab staffer, who's an
NYS k-12 certified teacher with a specialty in art.

Here's a little more about the plans for it...


Goals of the course
 
·     Develop on a constrained platform
·     Work as team members on an international open source effort
·     Learn about designing educational software
·     Engage with local Rochester Developers
·     Explore the controversy of technology¹s potential impact on the third
world and international priorities for aid

6.0          Topics (outline):
6.0  What is the OLPC Movement
6.0.1     History
6.0.2     Community Goals
6.0.3     Educational Philosophy and how it formed the OS and Hardware
Development
6.0.4     Introduction to the Community Members and Resources
6.1  The Platform
6.1.1     Hardware
6.1.2     OS
6.1.3     Networking
6.1.4     Included Applications
6.1.5     Development languages and Packages
6.2  Development Projects and Timelines
6.2.1     Project Design Docs
6.2.2     Project Management
6.2.3     Team Formation
6.3  Developing for Constrained Platforms
6.3.1     Design Constraints
6.3.2     Tech Constraints
6.3.3     HCI Impacts
6.4  Technology¹s impact
6.4.1     Digital divide in the US and third world countries
6.4.2     As a priority over other forms of aid


As you can see, I'm not focused on making this a "develop in Python" course
per se.  I want the students to experience FOSS and community togetherness
and participating in something larger than the average class project.  I'm
as happy to see them developing throw away prototypes of math
exercises/games in e-toys or scratch as I am in Python.  Whatever we can do
to advance these efforts over the next months is fine with me.

Additionally, RIT is a CO-OP university.  That means that students must have
full-time, paid work in their field for 3 10-11 week blocks as a requirement
of graduation.

If the work being done is for a non-profit, the paid portion of the
requirement can be waived.

So it's quite possible some students would want to continue over the summer
on this project, they'd just need someone from an organization to certify
the full-time aspects and evaluate their performance.

So that's the resource you have available


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