[Sugar-devel] Sugar on a low-cost tablet for an NGO in India

[Chris Leonard]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 10:18 AM, badday <baddaypc at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I now face some struggle where to find all the software and material used in
> that project as in the sugar labs activity website I can hardly find what I
> was looking for. It would also be nice if somebody could tell me about the
> localization process regarding Hindi as I could not find too much on the web
> about it.
>


The main reason you will have a hard time finding the software on the
Sugar site is that AFAICT, neither Sugar (nor Linux, nor OLPC
hardware)  was used at all.

I believe they used Motorola XOOM tablets running Android with a blend
of custom developed software like Nell and some other (proprietary?)
packages.

You'll find some links to the Nell software on cscott's blog:

http://cananian.livejournal.com/67703.html

You'll want to watch the OLPC team explain the Reading Project in these videos.

http://blog.laptop.org/2012/11/03/the-reading-project-in-ethiopia-explained-by-the-olpc-team-involved-in-the-experiment/

You'll also find more on the OLPC wiki:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Literacy_Project

I think you will find that this was primarily a highly instrumented
experiment to see how children with no previous exposure to technology
learned to use tech and how portions of that tech could be used to
introduce elements of literacy.  As an experiment, I imagine it is
somewhat short of a full-fledged production learning environment (like
Sugar).  No offense intended, as a scientist myself, well-designed and
controlled experiments are near and dear to my heart, but it is
important for you to compare the experiment's goals against your own
to make sure they are aligned.

While it is certainly important work addressing one of the core
hypotheses of the OLPC model (particularly, in less developed areas),
but I'm not entirely sure that you would want to simply copy the
hardware/software setup of the experiment without the clear intent to
replicate it and the monitoring infrastructure developed to assess
it's results.  Of course, the OLPC folks who actually ran the
experiment may reply for themselves, so there is no need to take my
word for any of this.

cjl