[Sugar-devel] sugar digest 2012-09-06

[Salil Konkar]

The video of Walter's talk at the Goa Instutute of Management are available
in three parts, at the links given below:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6awWWLoN0

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juaN4El1mC8

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcDTuqeBvk


Salil.


On 6 September 2012 23:28, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. Just back from two exhilarating weeks in India. Along with Harriet
> Vidyasagar, I visited with Sugar and OLPC aficionados in Delhi, Goa,
> Mumbai, and Guwahati. It was quite eye-opening.
>
> The first stop was Delhi. Harriet had arranged meetings with Sesame
> Street India, which is using Sugar in an after-school program. They
> were blown away when I told them the history of the Simple Graph
> program, one of their favorites. Then we went to JNU where I met with
> Dr. Ajith Kumar. Kumar works at the inter-university particle
> accelerator center, but is also the inventor of ExpEyes [1], a
> peripheral device similar to Arduino (or Lego WeDo) but for more
> serious EE work (it has a signal generator and a buffer for doing
> precise sampling of signals). Of course, I could not resist writing a
> Turtle Art plugin for his device [2].
>
> I also attended a seminar on Digital Literacy sponsored by the
> Hindustan Times, Intel, and Microsoft. The seminar itself was pretty
> depressing: a very paternalistic approach to providing government
> services to the masses. But I met a number of good people there whom I
> will be following up with.
>
> Also in Delhi, I got a chance to see Manusheel Gupta, who had interned
> for me in the very early days of OLPC. It was very nice to catch up.
>
> The next stop was Goa, where there is a small OLPC deployment. One of
> the highlights of the trip was finally meeting Salil Konkar, who has
> been maintaining the deployment on a volunteer basis. There are not
> enough laptops for each child to get their own, so before each class,
> a selected group of students retrieve then (XO 1.0s) from a charging
> station (designed at the Homi Bhabha Centre) for use in the class. The
> students, perhaps seven to eight years old,  were using the Numbers
> activity that day, and although it was somewhat of a traditional class
> in format--desks in rows facing forward--they were actively engaged
> and helping each other. I had a prototype of XO Touch with me, so I
> did a small study with some of the kids to see how they took to it.
> (Although it is unfair to compare with the erratic touchpad of the
> first-generation XO 1.0s, it was nonetheless obvious that touch will
> make a big difference: they interface, which had been getting in the
> way was suddenly in background; all focus was on the math.)
>
> Another highlight in Goa was the opportunity to meet Rita Paes, who
> directs the Nirmala Institute, a teacher-training college [3]. I got a
> chance to talk to the students about Sugar (who welcomed me with a
> lovely ceremony) and with Rita about the potential for establishing a
> center of excellence for teacher training to support our efforts in
> India. I saw great potential. Rita also introduced Harriet and me to
> some locals who have interest in helping with the localization of
> Sugar into Konkani. It was interesting to me that some people write
> Konkani using Latin script, while others use Devanagari script. It is
> somewhat of a political issue, so Chris Leonard has enable both
> communities to work in pootle ([4], [5]).
>
> From there, I went to the University of Goa [6], where I gave a
> lecture to the engineering students. The next evening, I gave a
> seminar on how to write a Sugar activity to about seventy students.
> Clearly there is some latent interest in the project. I also have a
> lecture at the local meeting of the ACM, which happened to coincide
> with my visit. Finally, I travelled an hour out of town to the Goa
> Institute of Management [7], a beautiful campus on a hill top, to talk
> to the students on the theme of "learning to change the world." We
> discussed strategies for making Sugar (and OLPC) take hold on the
> Peninsula.
>
> From Goa I travelled to Mumbai, where I was hosted by the Homi Bhabha
> Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
> specifically G Nagarjuna and his students at the Gnowledge Lab [8].
> G's students are well versed in Sugar, having been active in
> supporting the OLPC deployment in Khairat [9]. Their principal project
> is metastudio.org [10], a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace that
> utilizes many semantic features. We discussed the possibility of
> folding some of their work into future School Server designs.
> Hopefully they will be able to participate (mostly likely on line) in
> the discussions at the SF summit [11].
>
> From Mumbai, I visited two schools: a school for children with
> disabilities and the village school in Khairat. At the former, I
> discussed with the computer teacher the possibility of using Sugar
> instead of Microsoft Windows XP as a way to engage the children more
> directly. While Sugar is attractive from the learning perspective, one
> concern is that a good deal of the computer training is geared towards
> an exam that is based on master of Microsoft products that is a hurtle
> the children must jump over in order to enter the job market. Of
> course, for most populations of learners, master one word processor
> means that one can quickly master any other, but it is still to be
> demonstrated that such a transfer would occur with this population.
>
> At the school in Khairat, I got a chance to see what has sprouted from
> the seed that Carla Gomez Monroy planted four years ago. Khairat was
> one of the early OLPC deployments and, although the program has as yet
> to take off in India as a whole, this program is still going strong.
> Harriet and I were welcomed to the village with a traditional ceremony
> that included beautiful garlands of flowers. We sat with some of the
> mothers and preschool children, whom I immediately presented the XO
> Touch. The children took to it immediately. One child, using paint,
> kept looking at his finger for the ink. But the real fun was visiting
> the classroom. The children took turns standing in front of the class
> to talk about their work: often drawing, custom-made memory games,
> writing (in both English and Marathi--they are completely fluid in
> switching between scripts on the XO keyboard), and Turtle Art. I got
> to watch as a child figured out how to scale his drawings in Turtle
> Art. I got a chance to present to the class, so I thought I would
> engage them in something a bit different. Daniel Drake has written a
> yet-to-be-released activity that features some animated dance and
> exercise moves. I showed them some dances and they did not need
> prompting to follow along. But then I asked them to some me some of
> the local dance steps. I challenged them to make their own dance
> videos and coached them through the process using Turtle Art (See
> [12]). They quickly grasped the concept behind the various media
> blocks (they had previously been using an old version of Turtle Art
> that did not yet have these features). Together we engaged in some
> "hard fun."
>
> My next stop was IIT Guwahati. I gave the keynote at Techniche [13],
> the annual techno-management festival. Interestingly, as I was staying
> at the university guest house, I had a chance to interact with much of
> the staff, particularly in the kitchen (did I mention I love Indian
> food?). They were really taken with the XO and we discussed how we
> might get some for their children. As it turns out, the students at
> the IIT run a school for the children of the workers, so perhaps it is
> not out of the question.
>
> I spent another 24 hours in Delhi. Harriet and I spent much of the day
> with Satyaakam Goswami and his students at JNU and members of the
> local FOSS community.  In addition to being very active in helping to
> translate Sugar into Hindi, Satyaakam has been working in an urban
> school in Nithari, using Raspberry PI [14]. I visited the school and
> only have admiration for the teachers and students who seem to be
> thriving despite very difficult circumstances.  As with the school for
> the disabled, much of the emphasis in the school is for the children
> to pass their exams, so in discussion with the teachers, we talked
> about trying to establish some extra-curricular activities for the
> children using Sugar.
>
> India opened my eyes both to the possibilities and the challenges of
> Sugar and OLPC. Many thanks to Harriet for her support. And to the
> numerous volunteers I met who are trying to give the opportunity of
> learning to so many children.
>
> 2. In response to feedback from FZT [15], I released a new version of
> the Nutrition activity [16]. Also, in the spirit of eating my own dog
> food, as usual I gave my talks in India using Turtle Art. In the
> process, I uncovered some corner cases in some of the new features I
> had introduced in Version 154. Version 156 has some bug fixes [17].
>
> 3. I just got the galley back from the publisher of a book I am
> writing (with Chuck Kane) about OLPC [18]. I hope to do justice to the
> project.
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 4. There are plans to hold the next OLPC SF summit [11] in San
> Francisco the weekend of October 19-21. We are looking into organizing
> a Sugar Camp ''following'' the summit.
>
> === Tech Talk ===
>
> Misc.
>
> * The last of Hippo is removed from the shell!!
> * Work on 13.1 is under way.
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> Visit our planet [19] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
>
> -walter
>
> ----
>
> [1] http://expeyes.in
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art/Plugins#Expeyes
> [3] http://www.nirmala-institute.com/
> [4] http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom/
> [5] http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom@latin/
> [6] http://www.unigoa.ac.in/department.php?adepid=10&mdepid=3
> [7] http://www.gim.ac.in
> [8] http://lab.gnowledge.org/
> [9] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India/DBF/Khairat_Chronicle
> [10] http://metastudio.org
> [11] http://olpcsf.org/
> [12] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/7/71/Dancedance.png
> [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniche
> [14]
> http://vinaychaddha.blogspot.in/2012/08/presentation-at-electronics-rocks-2012.html
> [15] http://www.fundacionzt.org/
> [16] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4555
> [17] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027
> [18]
> http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317
> [19] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
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>
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