OLPC Freedom++

I watched a video this morning about Science Leadership Academy, a high school which "gets" digital media and cooperative learning. They even have a 1:1 laptop program. I did more research, and their Acceptable Use Policy for their laptops includes the note:

Agree to not attempt to change hardware settings or non-cosmetic system software settings.

It's disappointing to see a Science Leadership Academy so closed-minded about technology. On one hand, they want to protect the school's MacBooks. On the other, students should learn and discover their technology on a pre-college level. One student made Flash programs in junior and senior year as independent learning projects. A search fails to find other programmers on their website or students' blogs.

Making and watching media on Apple's software will only take someone so far. Treating video as a creative medium, and software as an immutable machine, does these students a disservice. I certainly don't expect everyone to be an expert. What I hope is, students will look at their next video game or a homemade gadget like MakerFaire and think "I could make this" or "I know someone in my class who would make this". Smart filmmakers can work with new, interactive canvases such as Popcorn.js, Palpable Video, or Arcade Fire after a course in HTML and JavaScript, the underlying code that makes the web work.

We use the web every day. Not everyone will be a mechanic, but we shouldn't keep future science and media leaders from looking under the hood. OLPC is open through and through. When I see Walter Bender's e-mail on a Sugar-hacking student in Uruguay, and Bernie Innocenti's photos of kids doing XO repairs, these (elementary school!) students have been given the right tools. So great.

After-the-Fact Update

[Edit: written Friday, August 20th, at Entebbe Airport - in pencil]

The last few days were a storm of happenings. Getting a mixed 5th/6th grade class on Monday morning, I decided - perhaps unwisely - to show PhotoPacks, note some unfamiliarity with Browse, then move on to Pippy/Python programming. Somehow, we had a few groups with speaking computers by the end. But it would take a lot more preparation before I did a lesson like that again.

Tuesday was a return to Mountains of the Moon, both to present "Technology From Africa: Invented or Shaped by Africans" and to find grounding for a State Department-funded hackathon at the university. The beginning had a few bumps - I do not start presentations well - but the remainder was informative, organized. My top five are Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, OLPC, Google Trader / QuestionBox, and Google Mapmaker. Most were unknown to the students; a few were recognized by the head of the department. I also introduced the Google Static Maps API to their web classes. This lets less technical people request a custom map (see this blog, which has a map on the right). The State Department offered to hold an event in the future, so I connected them to the university. Still waiting to hear from this [edit: almost a week later, still waiting =( ]

Wednesday - had students make maps if Kasiisi, adding markers to show where they study and where they do activities such as Girl Guides, soccer, and Roots & Shoots. Hope to pass these along to a laptop-using community center in Kampala, which I found about the day before.

Thursday - last full day in Uganda. Last class. We went seamlessly from the start of class "oreire ota" [good morning] to students photographing the school on a beautiful day, to mapping their discoveries, to student-made RFID art, to the end and farewells. Spock's "live long and prosper" seemed appropriate. I got the best photos of my trip: kids holding up laptops to photograph wall murals, kneeling by gardens to capture individual flowers, a student's photo of the cook peeling matoke bananas. Everyone I'd talked to had held back on the RFID activity. Too complicated, impractical, unworkable. Fortunately, ever since the UTL technician Brian did his soldering, the technical parts have been working. I went ahead with my original small group lesson - draw an animal and connect it to a digital description or audio complement. After the first physical-digital bond, I had a queue of students asking for theirs next, now this one, then that one, and so on. All I had were a few student sentences and the artists' names. But when all was said and done, we had 16 students, myself, and the teacher all scanning drawings and marveling as the computer kept pace. I'll send a few photos of this whole thing to the technician [edit: done =) ]

Moral of the story: the kids can learn some pretty complicated technology. Take care, but don't underestimate them. It was hard to end the class, to tear myself away from laptop issues and wires, to pick up and fasten my helmet for the last time. I made my final goodbyes to Patrick, the science teacher, asking him to try using the sensors in his classes.

And then my work was done. I pedaled back to Kanyawara, helped make dinner, and that was that.

From Logan Airport

I'm sitting at the gate for Air Canada, taking care of some final about-to-leave business. I promised my Boston-area non-profit, DigiLiteracy, that I would be posting some lesson plans for Measure and Get Books. I also have some coding to do for my early summer research project. Putting this all together on the XO is an extra challenge, but it's still quite possible.

Once I get to Quebec, I will be calling in to a OLPC Uganda strategy conference call. There are a few large projects underway and several volunteers traveling in Uganda this summer, and if we work together we can maximize the laptops' usefulness and perhaps encourage more schools to adopt them. Sustaining a few isolated schools is quite difficult, but when more schools get computers and digital lessons, it will be easier to get support from teachers, businesses, and the education ministry.

Sensors from (and for) Scratch

Last week, I had the chance to visit the OLPC offices in Cambridge for a sensors workshop. I was there to represent this project and meet Tiffany, a fellow member of the Digital Literacy Project.

Claudia Urrea, Education Director of OLPC Latin America, showed us how to make sensors and integrate them into lessons. The XO laptop comes with Scratch, a programming language for kids, and the engineers at OLPC and SugarLabs have programmed it to work with sensors. Connecting to Scratch makes it possible for kids to have the microphone or other sensors trigger sounds and animations, or use a program to count and calculate the sensors' input.

I had no experience with Scratch before this workshop, so I modified Measure to put a step between the students and the untamed sensor data. Using Scratch lets students decide how to measure and respond to the sensors on a fundamental level, so in the long run it's the right activity for schools and class projects. But the moment I break out Scratch, it becomes a programming class. We are using real-world sensors so that the class can be hands-on and working with the real world - would programming make it too abstract and esoteric? Hmmm...

Claudia Urrea also told us about some homemade sensors, like making the pressure pads from Dance Dance Revolution with paper plates and aluminum foil. Tiffany suggested that the mesh network could be used to let students play a game together or compete using their sensors. This DDR/game idea, and a technical concept, kept me thinking the whole way home. The students should definitely make some different sensors in the class (LEDs will work, too). And if they like connecting their inventions to the laptops, this would definitely be something to add to Measure and/or Scratch.

Why laptops?

Much criticism gets sent OLPC's way for distributing laptops to children who may not have shoes, preventative medicine, or clean water. Some might ask, what would an African family want with a computer or a cell phone?

• Uganda has cell phones. The impact of mobile phones in Africa gets overlooked so often, even by my college's Engineers without Borders group. Uganda's largest bank, with a million members, is based on mobile phones. Google has offices in Uganda, and is one of many companies writing text-messaging apps in Uganda.


• The laptops are not given to kids, they are given to schools. No one is walking through the streets and handing out laptops. Each kid attends a school where they already follow a national curriculum and share a few old textbooks. Many principals have noticed that attendance of students and teachers, and parental support for their children's education, improves when laptops are used in the classroom. Each school is consulted, power and internet access are arranged, and teachers discuss their classroom curriculum with OLPC and volunteers.


• The projects are supported locally. In countries with many laptop schools, local groups and mentors get involved to continue the project. In Uruguay, where every child has a laptop, the education department uses classroom videos, blogs, and repair offices to keep the project running. Volunteers develop activities and help expand the project to new schools.


• Innovation takes inspiration and resources. I am fascinated by the story of William Kamkwamba, a teenager who built a windmill to power his home, based solely on a picture he found in a book. When he used the internet for the first time, the millions of results and images for 'windmill' left him awed. "Where was Google all this time?" he wondered [interview with Jon Stewart], and he took home an OLPC laptop for his school. Even without the internet, a USB drive can hold thousands of books and pictures. It takes just a few like-minded and resourceful students for more of these amazing stories to come true.

There are some theories about the future of education, business, and technology which are relevant, too. I'll keep the critics in mind when I write about those another day.

An Environmental Sensing Class

Quoting from my concept proposal:

Students at the Kasiisi Primary School in Uganda are taking part in an experiment in education. In the fifth grade classrooms, 155 students start the day by opening up lunchbox-sized green laptops. With these XO computers, The Kasiisi Project has taken a leading role in using technology to teach about the environment. Students can access the internet, take photos, plan projects, and type papers for their classes just like their peers in the developed world. The Environmental Sensing class will teach students at Kasiisi Primary School the skills of real-time measurement and monitoring of their environment using sensors. Although data collection, graphing, mapping, and reports will be done with their specialized laptops, technical portions of the project will use open-source software available for any computer.

Students will bridge the gap between technical and personal perspectives by making a creative community map, and then draw several overlays on tracing paper. These overlays will demonstrate multiple uses of water, causes and effects of pollution, and ways to protect the environment. Producing a paper map will lay the foundation towards composing a digital map which can be shared with classmates, pen pals, and online mapping sites.

The Kasiisi Project has supported education in rural Ugandan schools for 14 years. They have experience with visiting educators, novel educational initiatives, and research projects.