Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] sugar digest 2012-09-06
The video of Walter's talk at the Goa Instutute of Management are available in three parts, at the links given below: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6awWWLoN0 Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juaN4El1mC8 Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcDTuqeBvk Salil. On 6 September 2012 23:28, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: == Sugar Digest == 1. Just back from two exhilarating weeks in India. Along with Harriet Vidyasagar, I visited with Sugar and OLPC aficionados in Delhi, Goa, Mumbai, and Guwahati. It was quite eye-opening. The first stop was Delhi. Harriet had arranged meetings with Sesame Street India, which is using Sugar in an after-school program. They were blown away when I told them the history of the Simple Graph program, one of their favorites. Then we went to JNU where I met with Dr. Ajith Kumar. Kumar works at the inter-university particle accelerator center, but is also the inventor of ExpEyes [1], a peripheral device similar to Arduino (or Lego WeDo) but for more serious EE work (it has a signal generator and a buffer for doing precise sampling of signals). Of course, I could not resist writing a Turtle Art plugin for his device [2]. I also attended a seminar on Digital Literacy sponsored by the Hindustan Times, Intel, and Microsoft. The seminar itself was pretty depressing: a very paternalistic approach to providing government services to the masses. But I met a number of good people there whom I will be following up with. Also in Delhi, I got a chance to see Manusheel Gupta, who had interned for me in the very early days of OLPC. It was very nice to catch up. The next stop was Goa, where there is a small OLPC deployment. One of the highlights of the trip was finally meeting Salil Konkar, who has been maintaining the deployment on a volunteer basis. There are not enough laptops for each child to get their own, so before each class, a selected group of students retrieve then (XO 1.0s) from a charging station (designed at the Homi Bhabha Centre) for use in the class. The students, perhaps seven to eight years old, were using the Numbers activity that day, and although it was somewhat of a traditional class in format--desks in rows facing forward--they were actively engaged and helping each other. I had a prototype of XO Touch with me, so I did a small study with some of the kids to see how they took to it. (Although it is unfair to compare with the erratic touchpad of the first-generation XO 1.0s, it was nonetheless obvious that touch will make a big difference: they interface, which had been getting in the way was suddenly in background; all focus was on the math.) Another highlight in Goa was the opportunity to meet Rita Paes, who directs the Nirmala Institute, a teacher-training college [3]. I got a chance to talk to the students about Sugar (who welcomed me with a lovely ceremony) and with Rita about the potential for establishing a center of excellence for teacher training to support our efforts in India. I saw great potential. Rita also introduced Harriet and me to some locals who have interest in helping with the localization of Sugar into Konkani. It was interesting to me that some people write Konkani using Latin script, while others use Devanagari script. It is somewhat of a political issue, so Chris Leonard has enable both communities to work in pootle ([4], [5]). From there, I went to the University of Goa [6], where I gave a lecture to the engineering students. The next evening, I gave a seminar on how to write a Sugar activity to about seventy students. Clearly there is some latent interest in the project. I also have a lecture at the local meeting of the ACM, which happened to coincide with my visit. Finally, I travelled an hour out of town to the Goa Institute of Management [7], a beautiful campus on a hill top, to talk to the students on the theme of learning to change the world. We discussed strategies for making Sugar (and OLPC) take hold on the Peninsula. From Goa I travelled to Mumbai, where I was hosted by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, specifically G Nagarjuna and his students at the Gnowledge Lab [8]. G's students are well versed in Sugar, having been active in supporting the OLPC deployment in Khairat [9]. Their principal project is metastudio.org [10], a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace that utilizes many semantic features. We discussed the possibility of folding some of their work into future School Server designs. Hopefully they will be able to participate (mostly likely on line) in the discussions at the SF summit [11]. From Mumbai, I visited two schools: a school for children with disabilities and the village school in Khairat. At the former, I discussed with the computer teacher the possibility of using Sugar instead of Microsoft Windows XP as a way to engage the children more directly. While
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] sugar digest 2012-09-06
Thank's for share! Alan Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 12:51:06 +0530 From: salil.kon...@gmail.com To: walter.ben...@gmail.com CC: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org; community-n...@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] sugar digest 2012-09-06 The video of Walter's talk at the Goa Instutute of Management are available in three parts, at the links given below: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6awWWLoN0 Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juaN4El1mC8 Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcDTuqeBvk Salil. On 6 September 2012 23:28, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: == Sugar Digest == 1. Just back from two exhilarating weeks in India. Along with Harriet Vidyasagar, I visited with Sugar and OLPC aficionados in Delhi, Goa, Mumbai, and Guwahati. It was quite eye-opening. The first stop was Delhi. Harriet had arranged meetings with Sesame Street India, which is using Sugar in an after-school program. They were blown away when I told them the history of the Simple Graph program, one of their favorites. Then we went to JNU where I met with Dr. Ajith Kumar. Kumar works at the inter-university particle accelerator center, but is also the inventor of ExpEyes [1], a peripheral device similar to Arduino (or Lego WeDo) but for more serious EE work (it has a signal generator and a buffer for doing precise sampling of signals). Of course, I could not resist writing a Turtle Art plugin for his device [2]. I also attended a seminar on Digital Literacy sponsored by the Hindustan Times, Intel, and Microsoft. The seminar itself was pretty depressing: a very paternalistic approach to providing government services to the masses. But I met a number of good people there whom I will be following up with. Also in Delhi, I got a chance to see Manusheel Gupta, who had interned for me in the very early days of OLPC. It was very nice to catch up. The next stop was Goa, where there is a small OLPC deployment. One of the highlights of the trip was finally meeting Salil Konkar, who has been maintaining the deployment on a volunteer basis. There are not enough laptops for each child to get their own, so before each class, a selected group of students retrieve then (XO 1.0s) from a charging station (designed at the Homi Bhabha Centre) for use in the class. The students, perhaps seven to eight years old, were using the Numbers activity that day, and although it was somewhat of a traditional class in format--desks in rows facing forward--they were actively engaged and helping each other. I had a prototype of XO Touch with me, so I did a small study with some of the kids to see how they took to it. (Although it is unfair to compare with the erratic touchpad of the first-generation XO 1.0s, it was nonetheless obvious that touch will make a big difference: they interface, which had been getting in the way was suddenly in background; all focus was on the math.) Another highlight in Goa was the opportunity to meet Rita Paes, who directs the Nirmala Institute, a teacher-training college [3]. I got a chance to talk to the students about Sugar (who welcomed me with a lovely ceremony) and with Rita about the potential for establishing a center of excellence for teacher training to support our efforts in India. I saw great potential. Rita also introduced Harriet and me to some locals who have interest in helping with the localization of Sugar into Konkani. It was interesting to me that some people write Konkani using Latin script, while others use Devanagari script. It is somewhat of a political issue, so Chris Leonard has enable both communities to work in pootle ([4], [5]). From there, I went to the University of Goa [6], where I gave a lecture to the engineering students. The next evening, I gave a seminar on how to write a Sugar activity to about seventy students. Clearly there is some latent interest in the project. I also have a lecture at the local meeting of the ACM, which happened to coincide with my visit. Finally, I travelled an hour out of town to the Goa Institute of Management [7], a beautiful campus on a hill top, to talk to the students on the theme of learning to change the world. We discussed strategies for making Sugar (and OLPC) take hold on the Peninsula. From Goa I travelled to Mumbai, where I was hosted by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, specifically G Nagarjuna and his students at the Gnowledge Lab [8]. G's students are well versed in Sugar, having been active in supporting the OLPC deployment in Khairat [9]. Their principal project is metastudio.org [10], a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace that utilizes many semantic features. We discussed the possibility of folding some of their work into future School Server designs. Hopefully they will be able to participate (mostly likely on line) in the discussions at the SF summit [11
