Posts Tagged ‘olpc’

  • Hacking: First UTOS OLPC Hacknight

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    Last night, at the crack of 7pm, a new era of development in Utah began.  It began with 11 people in a room, talking about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, how it came to be and about the new partnership between UTOS, Fedora and Sugar Labs.  It was a night to be remembered.

    A short presentation (thanks to Karlie Robinson for the slides) about the XO Developer project was given.  Everyone seemed interested and awake, so that was good.

    We pulled up the list of activities and went through some of the 4th Grade math curriculum.  It’s a bit irksome that the activities aren’t well-defined.  Basically, all you get is a short description of an xo activity.  It’d be nice to have the components defined a little better.  This discussion led to the possibility of pulling in a few 4th grade teachers from around the local community.  We’ll see where this goes.

    Finally, after narrowing down our list of activities, we settled on 3 activities for now, and started defining components to develop.  It was agreed that we’d first create some command line applications, then return next month to put a GUI on them, and sugarize them.

    All in all, it was a fun evening, food and friends.  I look forward to next months OLPC meeting.  Watch this blog for more news about upcoming UTOS OLPC hackfests.  After the event, I created a wiki page for the UTOS-XO team, as well as a local mailing list for discussions to be had.  If you are interested in participating, please feel free to join the list and get yourself an XO.

    Pictures are available on flickr.

    Cheers,

    Clint

    Posted on April 24, 2009 to:

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  • New Program: UTOS joins Fedora Project and Sugar Labs to promote XO Developer Program

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    As announced on many mailing lists in the local area, the Utah Open Source Foundation has teamed up with the Fedora Ambassadors and the XO/OLPC project to promote the XO Developer Program.

    Here’s the email being sent around.  Feel free to share it with anyone you like to help get them involved in bettering the learning tools available using Free and Open Source Software.  I have added a few word changes and a couple additional links to help.

    The Utah Open Source Foundation has been working with the Fedora Ambassadors and the XO/OLPC folks to promote a new project.  Due to some recent changes in their structure, they’re looking for more developers and packagers for this project.

    If you are a python developer, interested in helping children learn on a cool bit of hardware that is very hard to break, have time to code between now and August and are willing to commit to working on the xo project for [at least] 1 year, the Fedora Project will provide you with a free XO laptop to keep.

    This project is fourth grade math curriculum for the XO/OLPC.  The idea being that once the major bits of this curriculum are developed, creating other versions will be much simpler.

    The requirements are that you give monthly updates on your progress to the Fedora Ambassadors.  It should also be obvious that you will be working with others to get requirements completed and development in for testing and released to packagers.

    If you are interested, I can provide you a laptop within 1-2 weeks as well as help you get a developers key and get started right away.  For more information visit these links:

    The point of this email is to interest you folks who would love to develop something useful in the world.  To change the way kids learn and grow and show the way open source software can provide this change.  If you are seriously interested in participating in this project and have a few hours a week to give to it, please contact me off list.

    If you are interested, contact me, <clint@utos.org> and we’ll get you started right away.

    Cheers,

    Clint

    Posted on February 27, 2009 to:

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