[IAEP] GPA Notes 7-15-09

[Anurag Goel]

Today at GPA:
10:00 : We set up the projector and computers. This time we booted the
computers for the students before they came. We had 12 computers set up
locally and were able to collaborate without problems. We opened the
Memorize activity with collaboration and had the computers ready to go
before the kids got there to avoid having students individually invite
friends to their activity.

11:00: The students came into the computer lab around 11. They sat on the
rug and Caroline explained "collaboration." She started off by taking the
kids to the Neighborhood view, something that they had not seen before. The
kids were happy to see their names next to their XO icon as Caroline hovered
over different people on the screen. After, we let the kids go to their
computers to begin playing the Memorize activity against their classmates.
It was the first time that the kids used the re-imaged sticks so the colors
were not the same. We told the students that they could change the color
later but eventually they got really involved in the Memorize activity and
totally forgot. Some of the kids were able to change who they were playing
against while others had difficulty. This is probably because we didn't
spend too much time on explaining how exactly to invite friends to your
activity. Kids who were able to collaborate with multiple classmates did so
on their own.

Note: Memorize did not always work when three people were collaborating at
the same time. In most cases two of the people could see each other while
the third person only saw the toolbar on the side and a grey box where the
Memorize cards were supposed to be. Perhaps the third person has to join at
the beginning of the game and not while it's already in progress?

11:30: Kids went back to the rug. Caroline introduced the students to the
Browse activity where she explained how to get images from Wikipedia and
save them to the journal. We took images of different states and saved them
to the journal to be used in the Memorize activity.

11:45: Kids went back to their computers and began using Browse to get
images of different states. They then put the images into their Memorize
games and played against each other.

Note: When some kids imported the image into Memorize they would import the
Browse activity by mistake. This confused some of the kids. Maybe we should
have some kind of error message when kids import something other than an
image file into Memorize?

12:15: Kids went back to the rug and Caroline briefly introduced
the Uruguay activity as well as an OLPC X-O. Many of the kids new Spanish
and played around with the activity on either the X-O or Caroline's
Classmate netbook. However, on the netbook the activity was not properly
scaled so we were unable to see the entire map and text.

12:30: Kids were off to lunch.

Over all today was quite successful because the kids remained engaged for 90
min when they had originally planned to stay for an hour. The teachers were
really helpful and assisted us by instructing the kids as much as possible.
Collaboration was successful, so that was definitely a big step for us. More
to come later.

-Anurag Goel


-- 
Anurag Goel
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