[Sugar-devel] Thank you and an update on the New Zealand XO-4 deployment

[Gonzalo Odiard]

Thanks by the report!
These are great news, congratulations.

Gonzalo


On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 5:20 AM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at tabitha.net.nz>wrote:

> This week Barry Vercoe, Nicoletta Rata-Skudder and I had the pleasure of
> spending three days with the first New Zealand school to purchase XO
> laptops for their students. This school is also the first XO-4 touchscreen
> deployment (I think in the world??).
>
> I wanted to publicly thank all the people who worked so hard to help
> ensure this deployment had a successful start, including the deployment
> being able to be in Maori, the preferred language for this school. Thanks
> to CJL for his endless support in making this happen, and for all his
> continuing help as we work towards a sustainable translation team.
>
> Thank you to Walter for helping with the keyboard issues. We hope to test
> your new keyboard preference in a future build. For those reading this
> email without knowing about the New Zealand deployment, we needed some
> changes to allow Macrons on vowels to be in single characters. We found the
> combining macron available in the standard keyboard was problematic.
>
> The laptops are being used with first year students (five year olds) with
> a teacher who has completed the "One Education" teacher training provided
> by One Laptop per Child Australia. There are other teachers within the
> school also working through this training to help them prepare to deploy
> XO-4 laptops in their classes. The students in her class had access to
> XO-1.75 laptops for two weeks prior to the arrival of XO-4 laptops.
>
> There are a few bugs in the build that we have identified since
> deployment, and a few activities that the students would really like to see
> available for XO-4, but overall a successful launch.
> The school is using xo-system 1a build 49 which is acquired from
> download.laptop.org.au and we customised it using Jerry's tinycore linux
> based customisation system. Many thanks to Jerry Vonau and James Cameron
> for producing this and helping us use it. This customisation meant we could
> have the laptops first start up in Maori and the children saw Maori
> language from the very first screen (where you put in your name/ingoa).
> We also bundled the following activities that the teacher had access to on
> the XO-1.75 during training (if the activity started on XO-4) - Cartoon
> builder, eToys, Get Books, Infoslicer, Maze, Story builder, the full Tam
> tam suite, Turtle machine and Typing Turtle.
> The teacher has asked us to investigate the jigsaw puzzle and slider
> puzzle activities for XO-4 as some children had made puzzles with their
> photos from Record on the XO-1.75 and enjoyed these activities.
> We noticed some performance issues with Record (the screen would freeze at
> times while they were preparing to take the photo) and we also could not
> get Undo to work in Write activity in the classroom. We will test these
> further and file bug reports when we know more.
>
> Thanks to DSD for the quick fix on the Browse performance issues.
>
> On leaving the school, the students were quickly gaining confidence in
> using the touchscreen as well as the touchpad, taking photos in Record and
> putting them in Write as part of story writing, and using the Paint
> activity. They were excited at every opportunity to use the XOs and were
> exploring all the activities with great enthusiasm.
>
> Thanks to all the others who also helped along the way. OLPC builds and
> deployments are a community effort, and we thank everyone involved. Please
> know that your efforts, advice and guidance has been worth the sharing, and
> this school is now enjoying their teaching and learning experiences with
> XO-4 laptops in the classroom.
>
> Thank you!
> Tabitha and Tom
>
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