Whats on Your Mind ?

I was invited for a site visit of OLPC in Chen­nai India , Arani is town around 150 Kms from Chen­nai here is a route map Route Map , and pic­tures below

OLPC in Chennai

, over­all the visit has been fruit­ful saw sugar @ work kids dis­cov­er­ing and learn­ing new things on there own , there were some 10 Xo’s which attracted around 200 kids from in and around the village.

The weather was too hot and dry i did not feel the humid­ity like Chen­nai so sug­gested them to install water cooler . The most pop­u­lar activ­i­ties were Paint , Wikipedia , lack to Inter­net is some­thing which needs to be looked into to get these kids talk out to the world.

on 20th the next day i vis­ited one more school which is a govt school which is under Sarva Shik­sha Abhiyan pro­gramme of govt of India , here i learned about the ABL ( activ­ity based learn­ing ) which is sim­i­lar to activ­ity based in Sugar but it was more struc­tured in the sense of the kid goes from one class to other after he has com­pleted a set of activ­i­ties in on sub­ject or class. In this school the four XO’s are pro­vided the pro­gramme is sched­ule to begin after sum­mer holidays.

things to be done in com­ing days , XO’s need Sugar upgrade. Teach­ers need train­ing , iden­tify kids who can teach other kids , get Inter­net con­nec­tion so that they can con­nect to the larger OLPC community .

Tried boot­ing OLPC from USB , OLPC has a secu­rity fea­ture to not boot from exter­nal devices by default , it comes with a secu­rity lock , we can remove this by

a) Get­ting a Devel­oper key
b) Flash­ing the firmware

The idea is to boot from USB device and run Ubuntu from USB then some apps over it, hope AMD proces­sor with 256 MB of Ram can take all this.