Hi all,<div><br></div><div>the formal part of day 1 of Sugar Camp #2 is slowly but surely coming to an end. Back in May I found David's daily updates from eduJAM! very useful so I thought I'd also briefly write up my impressions from today's events.</div> <div><br></div><div>Today was focused on a series of presentations:</div><div><br></div><div>(1) Deployment panel</div><div><br></div><div>We started into the day with a one hour panel providing an overview of several deployments. I spoke about the current status quo of Plan Ceibal and looked at some of their plans for 2011. Tony introduce OLE Nepal's project and then shed some light on developments in Rwanda such as their server and content bid. Mitch then spoke about eKindling's efforts in the Philippines. Finally Jonathan gave a brief overview of the Nosy Komba project he and many others in the French community have been working on. We tried to keep things short and sweet but ended up talking a little too long, yet there was still quite some time for discussing questions from Bastien and the audience. One OLPC Europe staff member opened a pandora's box about evaluation which led to some particularly interesting exchanges and comments. From my point of view this was a good start into the day, especially since it provided a broad overview of some of the things which are happening in the OLPC / Sugar world.</div> <div><br></div><div>(2) Astronomy</div><div><br></div><div>After the OPPP ("One Pizza Per Participant" - Copyleft Gary Martin;-) lunch session Pierre Léna, a French astrophysicist and member of the Academy of Science, who presented a very cool and inspiring way to use the XO to learn about the moon. The core ingredients were a small telescope providing an x16 zoom factor in combination with some good learning materials. I honestly loved the idea and found it to be one of the coolest uses of the XO in quite a while. You can find more information about this effort at <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Moon#Learning_Resources" target="_blank">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Moon#Learning_Resources</a></div> <div><br></div><div>(3) Nosy Komba</div><div><br></div><div>Jonathan and Xavier presented the deployment on Nosy Komba which is one of three OLPC projects on Madagascar (another one is supported by the OLPC SF community and supposedly there is also an OLPCorps project there which might have survived). They currently have 215 XOs and regularly have volunteers from a business school here in Paris go down there to support the project. Xavier provided an in-depth report of a 15km wireless link which they built to connect the school to the Internet and highlighted some of the interesting challenges this effort ran into. Even though I had heard about the deployment from Bastien during eduJAM! it was great to learn many more details and see plenty of photos. It definitely sounds like the project is going well and I can't wait to see how the project will progress over the coming months and years.</div> <div><br></div><div>(4) Nutrition</div> <div><br></div><div>As part of her Master's thesis Stefanie Nobel developed a nutrition focused program (supported by Danone Research) which is planned to run on Sugar but is currently implemented as a Web application. While I write these lines Sascha Silbe is working with her to deal with some of the bugs she's running into on Sugar. The program is definitely very interesting and somewhat reminds me of the Saludame project in Uruguay so I hope that we'll see it run on Sugar soon.</div> <div><br></div><div>(5) Story telling (A toi de jouer)</div><div><br></div><div>The last presentation of the day was focused on a story telling activity called "A toi de jouer" which is currently being developed by Florent Pigout in collaboration with Bastien and Lionel from OLPC France. Again, things are still a little rough around the edges but it's a very promising effort which I'm sure many children and teachers around the world will find useful once it becomes available.</div> <div><br></div><div>As always plenty of interesting discussions and conversations were had during the breaks and it was great to catch up with many people I hadn't seen in a while, plus finally be able to meet rgs, Mitch, Stefanie, etc.</div> <div><br></div><div>Anyway, in my opinion it was definitely a great first day and now I'm really looking forward to the many work tasks which we'll be tackling tomorrow and on Monday:-)<br></div><div><br>Cheers,</div> <div>Christoph</div><div><div><br></div>-- <br>Christoph Derndorfer<div> <br><div>editor, OLPC News [<a href="http://www.olpcnews.com" target="_blank">www.olpcnews.com</a>]<br>volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [<a href="http://www.olpc.at" target="_blank">www.olpc.at</a>]</div><div><br></div><div>e-mail: <a href="mailto:christoph@derndorfer.eu" target="_blank">christoph@derndorfer.eu</a></div> <div><br></div></div><br> </div>