[math4] RIT and the Fedora Developers XO Program

[Steve Buck]

Is this something that we may want to get going at other uni's?  My
brother is a professor in the UMASS system.  I could see if there is an
interested at his school.

Also are we looking for teachers to be involved from a non-technical
perspective?

I'm sorry if these questions have been hashed out already, I'm still new
here.

Steve.

On Mar 02 10:41, Karlie Robinson wrote:
> -------- 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 technology?s 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  Technology?s 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
> 
> 
> <removed previous conversations>
> 
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