[IAEP] OLPC at UW Madison - was Re: Study with Scratch?

[David Farning]

Brian,

I am forwarding this thread to the iaep ( its an education project) mailing
list so others can see what you are working on.

By way of an introduction to the list Brian and Silas are leading an OLPC
student organization at the University of Wisconsin.  Dr. Sandra Couter is
their organization sponsor and director of the engineering learning center.
I had the opportunity to meet with them for a few hour earlier this week.
These are some high energy as well as high achieving people.

Of great interest was a discussion we had about an XO/OLPC/SL course the
Eng. Department is offering next semester. It would be great if course could
focus on how to define and measure the effectiveness of the device and
learning platform:)

thanks
david


On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Brian <excellsior at gmail.com> wrote:

> *LIVEUSB UPDATE*
>
> I have had a few minutes here at work at the end of the day to play with
> liveusb things.  I have had very immediate success with getting a liveusb
> created, bootable, and booted.  Try these steps:
>
> 1) download live image from: http://www.sugarlabs.org/go/Supported_systems
>     - i used the starch image of fedora (sugar v.8.2) w/ direct link:
> http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/sugar-spin.iso
> 2) create a liveusb w/ https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator
>     - runs fine on winxp
> 3) boot sugar on your laptop!


The developers at Redhat and Fedora have been great assets as we have been
working to make Sugar available everywhere!

Sugar is now running on Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu.  If any of these Linux
distributions run on your hardware, Sugar will run.  Sugar runs as a desktop
, like GNOME or KDE, on top of theses distributions so we can take advantage
ubiquity of linux on 'standard' hardware.


>
> Right now I'm off to the Kohl Center to do a few other things before the
> hockey game tonight, but I'll keep you guys posted on what success I have.
> ifconfig indicates that it loaded the nic drivers successfully (dell
> latitude d630), although i am not seeing any wifi networks show up yet in
> the neighborhood view.  (f1-4 keys work just as shortcut keys do on XOs.)
> The laptops are super quick and smooth with the gui, as could be expected.
> This is also my first go-round with 8.2.0, since I haven't updated my own XO
> yet.
>

If you find bugs, please post them in the bugtracker at
http://dev.laptop.org/ . We are in the process of setting up our own
bugtracker at sugarlabs.org, but in the meantime we will continue to use
d.l.o.

>
> Have a great weekend everyone, and happy hacking :)
> Brian
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Brian Kyle <bakyle at wisc.edu> wrote:
>
>> Andrea,
>>
>> I'd like to post you on some exciting news.  One wonder on my personal
>> wish-list has been the question: if Sugar is really just the gui/windows
>> manager that everyone claims it is, why don't we see it anywhere but the
>> XOs?  The open-source community has answered!  (Or more truthfully, I have
>> not had time to dig deep enough...)  *Sugar running on any *nix kernel.*
>>
>> Silas and I, with Sandy graciously taking a few minutes to visit with us
>> as well, spoke Wednesday afternoon with David Farning of Sugarlabs.  He
>> informed us that Sugar will be preinstalled on all of the upcoming Fedora
>> builds as a window manager.  Great news for those who don't wish to purchase
>> new hardware (e.g. XOs), don't see them as a need (e.g. downgrade), or for
>> many other reasons you might imagine.  Great news for those wishing to
>> propagate this little constructionist platform as well...  Perhaps there is
>> an opportunity here for your class?
>>
>> To sweeten the deal, there is a live-usb build with Sugar that allows
>> saving, so your students could continue working with their Scratch projects
>> at home.  I have googled to find a few possible solutions, but will talk
>> with David about what is most current and what he recommends.  The following
>> is from a Sept 30th Sugar mailing list:
>>
>> Sugar Live CDs: Greg Dekoenigsberg reports progress on a Fedora
>>> Live CD/USB  based on rawhide/F10. He has a LiveCD for Fedora 10 devel
>>> (Rawhide) that allows a Sugar 0.82 boot option via GDM. Activiites are
>>> still missing, but Greg says that we will close this gap quickly.
>>> There is also a kickstart file that can be used by any Fedora user to
>>> generate such an
>>> image trivially (See
>>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#Chapter_1._Introduction
>>> for some background on Fedora kickstarts). Also, see
>>> https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator for help on making a
>>> Windows-bootable LiveUSB for Fedora.
>>>
>>> Bryan Kearney built a virtual image for the Sugar rawhide package. To
>>> use it: (1) download http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugar-rawhide.tgz ;
>>> (2) uncompress the .tgz file; and (3) run "virt-image
>>> sugar-rawhide.xml".
>>>
>>  g
>> I suppose I went a little bit beyond "brief" here, but let me know if you
>> have any success (or time for experimenting :)) along this avenue.  I would
>> be happy to help with what I can, and David has volunteered to be a resource
>> to us and our student org to the Sugar community at large.
>>
>> All the best,
>> Brian
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau <
>> dusseau at cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> I do have 14 kids this semester and we could put 14 XOs to good use --
>>> at least through December.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Andrea
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Sandra Courter <courter at engr.wisc.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>> > Andrea, I think your idea has great potential. I will discuss your
>>> informal
>>> > proposal with the leadership team.  Sounds like you would need 14 XO
>>> > computers, right?
>>> > Sandy
>>> >
>>> > Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> Hi UW-OLPC,
>>> >>
>>> >> I wanted to introduce myself to those of you whom I have not been able
>>> >> to meet yet.  I attended your OLPC project meeting on Monday and am
>>> >> interested in being involved.
>>> >>
>>> >> To give you some background: I'm a faculty member in the Computer
>>> >> Sciences department and have been experimenting lately with teaching
>>> >> 4th/5th graders computer programming with Scratch from MIT.  This
>>> >> semester, we've been running an afterschool club with 14 kids (6
>>> >> girls, 8 boys) at Shorewood Elementary.    There are a few details
>>> >> here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dusseau/catapult.html<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Edusseau/catapult.html>
>>> >>
>>> >> So far, we've been running Scratch on $500 Dell laptops that I've been
>>> >> carting around (the kids do not get to take them home).
>>> >>
>>> >> Given that Scratch also runs on the XO, I thought this might set up an
>>> >> opportunity for a good comparison study between using traditional
>>> >> laptops (our control group) and the XO.
>>> >>
>>> >> I haven't played around with the XO much yet, but it seems to me that
>>> >> it is disappointingly slow for running Scratch.  I am curious as to
>>> >> whether the slowness would bother the kids or not.
>>> >>
>>> >> One idea for this semester (the club is about  half-way done for this
>>> >> semester) is to have some (or all) of the kids switch to using an XO
>>> >> for the remaining weeks and we could compare the experiences.
>>> >> Certainly, the draw of being able to take the XO home (if that is
>>> >> allowed) and work on their Scratch projects outside of the club (which
>>> >> very few are currently doing), might make up for the XO's slowness.
>>> >>
>>> >> If the XO results from this semester are promising, we could then be
>>> >> more methodical next semester and give 1/2 the kids XOs and 1/2 my
>>> >> $500 laptops and compare their experiences (and final projects).
>>> >>
>>> >> Thoughts?
>>> >>
>>> >> Thanks,
>>> >> Andrea
>>> >>
>>> >> ---
>>> >> You are currently subscribed to uw-olpc as: courter at engr.wisc.edu.
>>> >> To unsubscribe click here:
>>> >>
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>>> >> or send a blank email to
>>> >>
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>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Sandra Shaw Courter, PhD
>>> > Director, Engineering Learning Center
>>> > Professor, Engineering Professional Development
>>> > University of Wisconsin - Madison
>>> > Engineering Centers Building, room M1012
>>> > 1550 Engineering Drive
>>> > Madison, WI 53706
>>> > 608-265-9767 phone
>>> > 608-265-9768 fax
>>> >
>>>
>>
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