Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: xo laptop

  • March OLPC Meeting Houston (Notes)

    Hi, I wanted to provide information about the recent meeting of the Houston OLPC meeting, which featured Samuel Klein, the director of community content.   I don’t know how much of these nuggets of information was off-the-cuff and how much is official; use your own judgment. After the meeting, we met at Beck’s Prime for Hamburgers. Here is some tidbits we learned over that day:

    • OLPC is due to have a major update in a week or two. (Translation: two to three weeks). Here are the release notes. This update is expected to fix lots of things (which may have already arrived in the minor updates).; Klein mentioned a few things I don’t remember. He mentioned faster startup time for Activities,  better mappings of the game buttons on the display (useful for reading in tablet mode), improved handling of video and other multimedia. However, you will need to download  Activities and  Collections again, and possibly other customizations you made to the machine (such as Flash) . For this update, they separated Activities from Updates, so after this Update, it will no longer be necessary to reinstall activities.
    • Klein confirmed that that for Update 1, drivers/libraries have been written to make use of the trackpad (which up until now was disabled). That means that developers of Activities will be able to integrate the trackpad (and handwriting detection)  fairly soon although no activity included with the update will be able to use it.
    • Klein showed off a 3-D game called Bounce which was the hit for the meeting. In addition to being like a 3-D pong, children are able to configure/edit the game to increase the physical dimensions of the play area and speed.
    • I learned quite by accident how to install content collections (i.e., .xol files)  in XO. The collections page has so far been poorly maintained and documented. All you have to do is download the .xol file. Afterwards, when you open up the Browse Activity (as if you plan to surf the web), the newly added collections will appear on the left hand side of the home page  underneath each categories (after you expand them). This is so non-obvious it’s hilarious.
    • So far not a lot of .xol content has been available. Most of the content are image galleries and little else.  But here are three .xol files you should download: Wikislice General,  Wikislice Animals, and Wikihow. 
    • Building a collection is not hard.  It basically is a bunch of files readable by XO which are bundled together and zipped, along with a configuration file. So far, a lot of the collections are PDF files, so they take a while to load, but I suspect it would be possible to build a collection out of HTML files and view it inside the same Browse activity. That would definitely avoid the slowness of PDF loads. 
    • I have plans to put together a storybook/picture book of well known children’s tales. I plan to have two volumes: Level 1 and level 2 (depending on age level).  I am definitely taking suggestions for content!
    • Klein confirmed that XO owners have had difficulties sharing activities with XO owners who have already updated to a more recent version.  (That is why for example sharing activities was relatively easy at our first meeting, but became more difficult after people updated their machines with each minor release). Hopefully, if everyone gets updated to the Major Update 1, these problems will disappear. (I’m assuming that WPA authentication problems will disappear as well).
    • Klein confirmed that XO will be available for sale to Americans at the end of 2008.
    • Klein mentioned something interesting; although olpcnews.com is popular with users inside North America, in fact,  developers mainly follow the official forums, so if you want to give feedback or hear from people who actually know what they’re talking about, you should check the official forums in addition to olpcnews.
    • Houstonian Aaron Poffenberger did a demo to show off Webkinz on the XO. Our main problem turned out not to be XO but the library’s wifi capabilities.

    This was a really fun meeting. The topic for April’s meeting will be Updating; if you haven’t had time to update your XOs, someone at the meeting will be happy to do so. I haven’t picked a meeting date yet but would entertain suggestions. (We’ll try to meet at Montrose library this time on a Saturday afternoon).

  • Announcement: A new Monthly Houston OLPC club for kids

    Update Jan 3: First Meeting will be Saturday Jan 19 at Montrose Library 3:00 PM.  (Read more details and RSVP here)

    Update December 19: See the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Houston-laptops-for-children/ mailing list and the Houston OLPC user forum

    Update: I wrote an article for OLPCNews about my user group for XO laptop owners.

    Big news: I have bought a XO/OLPC laptop this morning. I’ll be giving it to my nephew this Christmas. The Teleread ebook technology site I write for will provide extensive coverage of XO (though it will have to be from an adult’s perspective until Christmas day). Here’s an article I posted yesterday covering the current features and its potential as an ebook reading device for children.

    Although the number of OLPC owners in Houston will probably be small, I’m guessing there will be enough to support a monthly club (and they’d definitely want to get together). Also, I think that declining prices and Intel’s plan to support the OLPC platform in their upcoming children’s device will probably mean the number of children on OLPC platform locally will increase over time.

    I was wondering:

    1. Is anyone in the Houston area already planning a pilot program or bulk-purchase of some kind?
    2. Are any teachers (and/or graduate students) in this area planning to become involved with preparing OLPC activities/lessons in any way?
    3. Are any organizations interested in providing any kind of support or this activity (in terms of facilities, supplies, people)?

    Also, I am looking for geeks/parents who are willing to help run/organize meetings. Preferably someone with a background in programming or education or creative thinking. As passionate as I am about this project, I probably wouldn’t have the ability or time to run anything larger than a monthly Saturday club (with guests, activities, etc). If someone else is running something similar (but in a more structured way or within a school environment), can you please let me know? Perhaps there are ways in which our efforts can compliment one another.

    The website I help run is interested in OLPC specifically for ebooks/textbooks. To that end, we will try to assemble a kid-friendly catalog of ebooks/e-textbooks for free download. Depending on the level of interest, we may also try to assemble lesson plans/learning activities and teacher’s guides.

    I bought the www.laptopsarefun.com domain yesterday and eventually that will be the place to go for information about Houston activities.

    Some other thoughts:

    1. Can kids who don’t have OLPC laptops or any laptops come to these meetings? Honestly, I haven’t thought that far in advance. I would love to keep the meetings as open as possible, and perhaps a student could share laptops with one or two guests. But if we have too many guests and not enough laptops, it could be a frustrating experience for everyone. Ideally, we’d love to have an organization provide extra laptops as a pilot/testing program. Organizations could buy laptops for discounted rates ($299 in amounts of 100 or more), but on the other hand, it’s easier to deal with kids who own their own laptops.
    2. Can parents/visitors/teachers attend these meetings? That really depends on the venue we have, the level of participation and the number of OLPC laptops. One idea is to have two separate meetings: one entirely for children, and another for adults/parents/teachers with a few children. We can work that out once we get closer to the meeting date.
    3. When and where will the first meeting be? Have you noticed that all of the FAQ answers so far are “I don’t know” :). My expectation is that the first meeting will be in the 2nd or 3rd week of January. I will try to find a convenient location. Interestingly, it may not be as vital to have Wifi because the devices are designed to facilitate ad hoc networking and collaboration.
    4. I (or my child) have a Linux or Apple or Windows Laptop. Is it possible for me to participate? It depends. It is possible to emulate a OLPC/XO laptop on both Windows and Linux (see the instructions here for how to emulate a OLPC laptop). The short answer is to download an image and use a program called qemu to create a successful emulator environment. I haven’t tried it yet, although I did try testing the Live CD. From what I’ve read, the emulators don’t have working sound, and they tend to respond more slowly than a normal OLPC, but they seem to work ok. I will have better information later.
    5. $400 is too expensive. Should I buy now or wait? Here’s a few things to keep in mind. I’m guessing the OLPC/XO machine will go down in price in the US to about $200 by summer (probably helped by people selling it on ebay). Also, next year Intel’s Classmate PC will be probably available at schools and/or sale to individuals in 2008. It has better hardware specs and will support Windows installations as well as linux/OLPC installations. I would expect their price to be in the $200-250 range when they appear. Also, don’t forget two other alternatives. Now you can buy a supercheap Asus EEE 701 laptop or better yet, buy a used laptop (which you could easily find for below $300). According to CNN, 40,000 units will be produced in November, 80,000 in December and 120,000 in January.
    6. Why is OLPC better than normal laptops? First, it’s hardware is designed specifically for a young person’s lifestyle, and the display is cutting edge. It’s easy to forget that this laptop is the ideal form factor for casual reading of downloadable ebooks(especially with the long battery life). Also, the software is chosen to support exploratory learning according to the constructivist teaching methods. It will be invaluable to teach people to program using kid-friendly programming methods (like etoys and python) and weave narratives using technology. Although open source development can be chaotic, in fact the final laptop version will have tight integration of features such as webcam, microphones, wifi. Using a OLPC will let you participate in a world community and take advantage of the incredible new software that is being produced in an open environment. Windows and even Apple laptops are designed for all kinds of uses and mainly for adults. This device’s sole purpose is educating children. In that respect the hardware is slightly different and the interface designed to facilitate play.
    7. What are the disadvantages of OLPC? First, hardware performance may not compare favorably to general use laptops, especially if the child intends to install a lot of new things. Although the device has lots of cool extras, printing might be an issue. The core features work, but some of the newer games and educational activities will be buggy. It might help if the parent has a background in Unix. If the device has problems, the parent will inevitably need to be the one to fix it. (By the way, the warranty on OLPC is only 30 days). Second, because OLPC is geared towards deployment in developing countries, we’re not likely to have a great number of children in your neighborhood using this device (especially at current price levels). So for the next few months in Houston kids will likely be on their own and limited on their ability to use the collaboration tools. As a standalone device, it works well. But to benefit from OLPC, a parent will need to take an active part in facilitating a child’s exploration with the device.
    8. Why do you want to start a Saturday club? Children with access to this device will benefit from hooking up with other kids who use this device. I can’t predict how popular this club will be or whether anyone will actually show up. But I am committed to running it at least for a few months.
    9. Can I see a video demo of the device? See David Pogue’s video demo. See also the screencaptures of an earlier version. See also the excellent simplified XO user guide prepared by Anne Gentle and others.
    10. How can I find more information/sign up for the meeting? This will take a while to get organized. The easiest way is to send me a note. Idiotprogrammer @ fastmailbox.net . Or leave a comment here. Or check www.laptopsarefun.com which will contain information about group meetings.
    11. Who are you anyway? Here’s my bio. I’m a former Peace Corps volunteer with a background in writing and instructional technology. And a love for linux.

  • Designing for Children: The Constructivist Approach

    In response to the announcement that SimCity will be ported to the One Laptop per Child platform, Alan Kay writes a long piece wondering whether Sim City is truly an example of constructivist learning. He talks about designing software environments for children and at the end concludes that Sim City might not be the best platform for that (he prefers something called etoys):

    If “children first!” is the rallying cry, then it makes sense to try to invent computer environments that use the very best ideas (and these are very hard to come up with). This is why the various groups that got interested in this romantic quest via early contact with Seymour have always been colleagues and never rivals. The hard to come by ideas for projects, representations, user interfaces, experiments, etc., have been freely traded back and forth. The notions of “thresholds below which is not worth going” have been jointly refined, etc. One of the parasitic difficulties is that computer environments, once made (with lots of effort and dedication) tend to form tribal bonds that are rather religious in nature. The amount of effort required plus the attendant religion makes it extremely difficult to take new insights and ideas and make brand new better environments for the children. The strong tendency is to use and reuse and incrementally expand the old environments.

    So, for young and youngish children (say from 4 to 12) we still have a whole world of design problems. For one thing, this is not an homogenous group. Cognitively and kinesthetically it is at least two groups (and three groupings is an even better fit). So, we really think of three specially designed and constructed environments here, where each should have graceful ramps into the next one.

    The current thresholds exclude many designs, but more than one kind of design could serve. If several designs could be found that serve, then we have a chance to see if the thresholds can be raised. This is why we encourage others to try their own comprehensive environments for children. Most of the historical progress in this area has come from a number of groups using each other’s ideas to make better attempts (this is a lot like the way any science is supposed to work). One of the difficulties today is that many of the attempts over the last 15 or so years have been done with too low a sense of threshold and thus start to clog and confuse the real issues.

    I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is “how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?” Most computer users have been mostly exposed to “productivity tools” in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are at their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning. What is the center and what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.

    OTOH, the extreme build it from scratch approach is not the best way for most minds, especially young ones. The best way seems to be to pick the areas that need to be from scratch and do the best job possible to make all difficulties be important ones whose overcoming is the whole point of the educational process (this is in direct analogy to how sports and music are taught — the desire is to facilitate a real change for the better, and this can be honestly difficult for the learner).

    Specifically about Simcity he says:

    SimCity is similar but more pernicious. It is a black box of “soft somewhat arbitrary knowledge” that the children can’t look at, question or change. For example, SC gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations. Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists would disagree violently. Alternate assumptions can’t be tried, etc.

    Both of these packages have won many “educational awards” from the pop culture, but in many ways they are anti-real-education because they miss what modern knowledge and thinking and epistemology are all about. This is why being “above threshold” and really understanding what this means is the deep key to making modern curricula and computer environments that will really help children lift themselves.

    Two nuggests from the slashdot discussion about whether Simcity is a truly educational tool. First, a comic dialogue exchange:

    Is this to give the kids a virtual sense of what it’s like to live in a 1st world country? “look at all of the nice luxuries you will never experience!” how about the irony of building a nuclear powerplant on a computer you have to handcrank?

    Reply: This comment is funny, but it relies on a common misperception that the poor kids for whom the OLPC was created have no idea what modern urban life is like. Most of them live in or in the shadow of large modern cities, Johannisberg, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Manila, and Mexico City, just to name a few. They have plenty of opportunities to see modern life, they just don’t have much opportunity to participate.

    Let me help you out with a simple analogy. You read slashdot, right? So, you have plenty of opportunities to see beautiful women, but all you get to do is watch, from a distance. That’s why you bought that stick of Axe Deoderant.