OLPC Learning Club - DC

The “Cube” in the basement of the MIT Media Lab

Our next meeting will be at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, April 26th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Bus Info)

Mike Lee will distill several years of visits to the MIT Media Lab into a photo log on the culture of innovation and invention that gave rise to the One Laptop Per Child project. To make more tangible some of the lab’s work, several commercially available products from spinoff companies and sponsors will be demonstrated including the Ambient Orb, Clocky, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch Sensor Board, Hyperscore, and E-ink.

Then we’ll cover the news on OLPC’s software Update.1 for the XO laptop and help install it for the brave. Much meshing should ensue.

We’ll also bring back the raffle with at least one XOView Camera Viewfinder as a prize.

UPDATE: An event page for this meeting has been created on Facebook.

Photo credit: Ewan McIntosh

What better way to end the week in Washington, DC than with a good XO geek fest? How about one with your favorite OLPC News writers at a local pub?

This Friday, we’ll have Jon Camfield, Mike Lee, Wayan Vota, and in from OLPC Austria, Christoph Derndorfer, at the Looking Glass Lounge in Petworth.

On tap will be a lively discussion of all things One Laptop Per Child as the beer brings out our brilliance in everything else. We’ll also have a collection of XO laptops for public use. If you’re around, do come join us:

OLPC News DC Meetup
Friday, March 28
Looking Glass Lounge
3634 Georgia Ave NW (map)
Near Georgia Avenue Metro Station
6pm till we stumble home

I’m testing out my new Flip Ultra video camera this week, so I used the camera’s built-in software to edit and automatically upload to YouTube this 5-minute video clip (playable above) of our guest speaker, Richard Bullington-McGuire, and his 7-year-old son Patrick as they talk about the projects they and Richard’s students have done in the MIT Media Lab’s free Scratch animation and programming software. In his talk, Richard said he finds the user interface of Scratch much more inviting than the eToys activity bundled with the XO. Scratch, however, still needs to have its interface “sugarized” to be more readable on the XO’s high resolution screen. I particularly enjoyed seeing Richard’s laminated set of Scratch Cards. The Scratch Cards illustrate a basic feature on one side and show the programming steps on the back. It would be great to have a large set of these for the XO and its bundled activities.

From my photos on Flickr, you can see that at this month’s meeting, we continued to attract a diverse group of parents, kids (lots of them!) and other XO fans of all ages. We made some more progress in getting the school server up and running on a laptop with an active antenna, but alas, we didn’t have a USB-to-ethernet adapter so that we could bridge to the open internet through the server.

Pizza for lunch was an impromptu suggestion at noon which produced enough contributions from the group to have Capital Pizza deliver a pile of pies and liters of drinks. Thanks again to Kevin Cole of the Gallaudet Research Institute for handling all the logistics of the meeting room. We are scheduled to meet back at Gallaudet in May.

Michael Connet of Nortel LearnIT, and the host of our last meeting, has just posted some of the fabulously creative student animations that were previewed. Highschooler Phi Tran was the primary animator, and in another video, he explains how he created them. In the animations, an energetic XO kid runs around a fanciful rendition of the Sugar user interface to demonstrate networking concepts through gestures and movement. The animations are the first in a series and one can easily imagine a superhero cartoon character coming out of this project. This is just another vivid example of the diverse talent we have in the DC area XO community. Bravo!

 Updated: 3/20/08

Hold the date: The next meeting of OLPC LC-DC will be hosted by Kevin Cole at Gallaudet University in DC.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup

When: Saturday, March 22nd, 2008, 10 am to 1pm

Where: Gallaudet University [map], Student Union Building, Lower Level [floorplan], Flexible Room L040 and L041, Washington, D.C. 20002

At the meeting, Richard Bullington-McGuire will demonstrate the MIT Media Lab’s Scratch animation program which also runs on the XO. Richard has created a number of Scratch courses that he has taught to gradeschool children in Virginia. Richard will give a quick overview of the class he’s teaching, show some of the classroom materials, explain how he got the seminar series started, and show what some of the projects students have done. He’ll also report on the alpha implementation of Scratch on the XO, with a quick explanation of what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s a screenshot of one of Richard’s student projects, a capture the flag game:

http://tinyurl.com/24vccq

Richard’s web site is:

http://www.obscure.org

In addition to Richard’s presentation, we’ll be offering technical support and an opportunity to mesh with other XOs.

Updated 2/20 - Note the location change from Arlington, VA to Nortel Networks in D.C. New information is below in BOLD starting with the Nortel street address.

I hear echoes of the Verizon Wireless commercials when I see all the people at our meetups trying to mesh. It’s the new primal urge of XO owners. Now it’s time to channel those urges into fun and productive activity!

Hot on the heels of our last meeting, Kevin Cole and Jeff Elkner are interested in hosting monthly XO meetups / development sprints. They are thinking of meeting the 4th Saturday of each month, and alternating the location between the Arlington Career Center and Gallaudet University (see map).

While still in the planning stage, the first one has already been scheduled for this month. The idea is to bring together three groups of people to work on the following things:

• Kids and parents who want to meet other kids and parents and do cool things together with their XOs.
• Software developers wanted to work on software for the XO.
• Educational materials developers wanting to collaborate on the development of educational materials for the XO.

Having these three groups co-locate will create all kinds of synergistic possibilities. Let the games begin!

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup

When: Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm

Where: Nortel Networks, 101 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC 20001

A team is setting up an OLPC school server (which will make meshing much easier) and coordinating with the OLPC Support team to help install system updates, activate developer’s keys on anyone’s XO and generally troubleshoot technical issues.

The meeting will start with a few minutes of introductions by the leaders of the table activities. Then we will break into groups for about 30 minutes for discussion. We’ll pause for quick reportouts from each group on tips, discoveries, aspirations, frustrations, etc. Then we’ll all mesh some more until 1 pm.

Nortel Networks is a secure office complex so we will have to assign someone to let people in between 9:45am-10am. The building is walking distance from the Union Station and Judiciary Square Metro Stations.

Click here for a map. Also, our wiki page is seeing some activity now.

The green squiggles in my illustration are from a camera toss photo by Dan Simpson licensed under CC 2.0.

Our first meeting of the OLPC Learning Club at the downtown offices of DC Cares attracted a diverse group of 48 XO enthusiasts, including some parents and children. The Vine blog, Grig, Richard, Herbert have writeups on the meeting. Walter Bender made a mention in this week’s OLPC Community News, and there are photos on Flickr by Jesse, Grig and myself. I want to especially thank our host Curtis Cannon, Andrew Halls, Jonathan Blocksom and Jonathan Hsu for helping with the meeting logistics. Also, Phil Shapiro has been a great cheerleader for the club and scored our first press clip with an article in the East Montgomery County Gazette. The evening was also, regrettably, a little less colorful as Wayan was away on his honeymoon.

I got there an hour early and double-parked out front so I could unload my bags of gear for show ‘n tell. To my surprise, there were already a couple people in the meeting room trying to wirelessly mesh their XOs. Parking was an easy roll down the adjacent underground garage. It turns out I was the only person who drove. While I got my gear laid out, Curtis and others let batches of people in through the secure front doors. By 6:25, we had a good crowd with the arrival of a group of high schoolers (from Arlington, I believe).

After distributing raffle tickets to everyone, I did a brief welcome and review of the facilities and agenda. Curtis (pictured above speaking to the group) joined me to talk about the mission and services of DC Cares and how they came to acquire seven U.S.-side Give One Get One laptops through the fundraising efforts of his friend Peter Corbett at the recent Technoliday party. DC Cares is a unique foundation in that it doesn’t grant money to support social change locally, but matches community assets such as volunteers, pro-bono consultants, non-profit board members, goods and services to help other non-profits build their capacity. We talked about how keeping the OLPC Learning Club diverse and engaged could produce excess energy that could be channeled into local social change in addition to feeding content and innovations back into the global OLPC braintrust to serve children and education.

Justin Thorp spoke next about his work on the World Digital Library project as a contractor at the Library of Congress. Justin had just concluded his last day on the project to become the [Web 2.0 Widgets] Developer Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies. Justin mentioned that few people realize that the LoC acquires assets in all languages from around the world, and is uniquely positioned (with funding from Google) to create a digital library of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other treasures from the library’s vast holdings. Justin also demoed the International Children’s Digital Library, a collection of digitized children’s books in many languages readable on the web via a kid-friendly user interface.

Then I started to juggle all the XO-related accessories I’ve accumulated since August. I began with the vignette of how I bumped into Nicholas Negroponte at SFO airport back in February 2006 to a meeting back in August 2007 when we (myself and another director representing my day job) were given two prototypes. I described how I experimented since then with accessories such as power adapters, solar panels, carrying bags, network adapters, and viewfinders for the XO camera. The most audience reaction was for the viewfinder made of LEGO bricks and my out-of-shape geek’s attempt at foot treadling the Freeplay Weza while doing the talk about it. A point I made was that OLPC perhaps somewhat overhyped the solar panels and human power options to uninformed G1G1 consumers who then romanticised the notion of getting easy power from hand-cranking or waving around an index card-sized solar panel. The solar and human power options for the XO require hours of patience or substantial physical exertion to generate usable amounts of power. I observed that there are some vivid lessons for our children in these accessories about the value of energy, and why adopting clean alternatives is important.

I closed the presentation with the raffle of two iLite Micro USB LED lights and a Targus Auto/Air Adapter. Jonathan Hsu also stood up front to offer for sale his fresh-off-the-manufacturing-line ZoWii USB ethernet adapters in XO green. About half the room converged on him to plunk down some green for green. We stayed around another hour to mesh and chat. OK. End. More in another post.

 I have things finalized for what should be a great meeting this week of the OLPC Learning Club. I think we might even beat our last meeting’s attendance of 42. Our email list now has over 95 names, and the introductions thread on the forum is full of interesting posts. Once again, the time and location:

Thursday, Jan 31, 2008, 6:30-9pm at

Greater DC Cares 1725 I (Eye) Street, NW, Street Level Entrance, SunTrust Conference Room, Washington, DC 20006

The DC Cares web site lists their address as 1727, but we’re actually going in an alternate entrance (links to photos are above). As mentioned before, DC Cares is 1/2 block from Farragut West Metro and 2 blocks from Farragut North. I’m sure there’s parking nearby in the typical downtown garages. Our host is Curtis Cannon if for some reason you don’t see me right away.

I’ll be there an hour early to help get things set up. I’ll bring some extra power strips and a WiFi router as there is no open access point. Mesh should work fine. As kindly suggested by other user groups, it would be a good idea to bring personal contact info cards of some sort for networking, a charged up XO, your green power adapter with an identifying mark or sticker on it and perhaps a fresh USB flash drive 1gb or larger if you want to seek help doing a system upgrade or software install.

Here’s the agenda:

6:30 - Mike’s welcome and logistics for the night

6:40 - Curtis Cannon, Greater DC Cares and Peter Corbett, iStrategy Labs on OLPC laptops for social change

6:50 - Justin Thorp on developing content for the OLPC XO

7:05 - Mike will demonstrate power options and accessories for the XO

7:20 - Raffle

7:30 - 9:00 Mingle and mesh

As always, feel free to bring a still or video camera to document the goings-on. We won’t have much more than pitchers of water, so you should try to grab a snack on your way. Kids are welcome. There’s even an adjoining room if they want their own playspace. I’m going to try to push out one more post before Thursday here, so check back if you can.

I was touched by Carla Gomez Monroy’s beautiful photograph of children using the XO laptop in Mongolia. Carla is part of the team that is still on the ground there beginning the deployment of 10,000 laptops that are first out to a developing country from the Give One Get One campaign. There are many more photos on the OLPC wiki.

Walter Bender also had this to say in this week’s OLPC community update:

3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.

We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.

Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We’re laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they’ll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it’s fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

We’re looking forward to a detailed report on the OLPC wiki in a few weeks.

.

So hold the date…

On Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 from 6:30 - 9pm, we’ll be meeting at

Greater DC Cares 1725 I (Eye) Street, NW, Ground Floor SunTrust Conference Room, Washington, DC 20006

The location is a half block from Farragut West Metro and about two blocks from Farragut North. I’ll do an in-person visit there in the next week to get a sense of the layout of the room as well as test out mesh and wifi access (I have to bring a router) with three or four XOs.

I really liked Wayan’s format of 10-minute podcast-friendly talks. Since I haven’t actually presented, I’d like to do a 10-minute photo tour of the MIT Media Lab and/or OLPC Headquarters. I may be visiting the Media Lab and OLPC before the meeting, so hopefully, I’ll have some fresh photos or even some video.

Then I’m sure Wayan can do a 5 or 10 minute update on the “State of OLPC.” Wayan will not be at the meeting because he’ll be honeymooning!

Lastly, I’d like to ask for a good presenter from our membership to do a quick lesson on something mesh-friendly like exchanging objects in Etoys, or perhaps orchestrating a TamTam band between a group of XOs.

Parents who want to bring kids are welcome to do so! The presentations should end by 7:10 and we’ll have from then until 9pm to mesh around. I’m thinking about kid-centered XO field trips on weekends for when it gets warmer, and I’d love to get input on that.

Please post in the comments or contact me directly at the email address at the top of the right side bar. Don’t forget the Introductions area of the forum.