Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - a celebration of the first-ever programmer and sort of an awareness-raising about the women working in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math today. Awareness? Well, Professor PZ Myers notes that:

""It is also my custom every year to have one [final exam question] be, "Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman"...

About 10% of the class leave it blank... Over half the time, I get the same mysterious answer: Marie Curie. We do not talk about Marie Curie in this class at all, and it's always a bit strange that they have to cast their minds back over a century to come up with a woman scientist."" Source

Adafruit Industries, an open hardware company founded by Limor Fried, has been posting profiles of accomplished scientists and educators all day today! Check it out!


Image from RobotGrrl's blog.

When I picture a world of tomorrow, I see it brimming with machines and we can't even imagine their workings. Sure, you will have an App Store to customize your devices. But only our best scientists and engineers will be able to start new companies and drive technology forward. We can't afford to have any group of people underrepresented in that future, not because of where they are from, who their parents are, or anything that appeared on their birth certificate on Day Zero. Economics isn't supply and demand, it's about necessity, inspiration, and ability. I think that's in the spirit of OLPC. We do our best to support kids' abilities and find the right person to inspire them.

Given what I've said above, when we introduce the OLPC sensors and gadgets and set up a mini-lab for the students, you can bet one of the laptops will be playing an episode of Sylvia's Super Awesome Mini-Maker Show. It's great for any science event!

Kindergarten XO

We've had a number of well-meaning discussions about whether the kindergarten here in Haiti can make use of the XO laptops. This morning, the kids used the laptops and their cameras for the first time! Here's a short video



We were thinking that a kindergarten is too early for each kid to use a laptop, but maybe the teacher can have two laptops for musical activities, photos (the teachers asked for dogs and vegetables so far), colors, and shapes (maybe even TurtleArt?). The kids here understood the laptop very quickly, and were excited both by the camera and our follow-up with the TamTam Mini soundboard.



Things kids surprisingly did not discover on their own: moving the camera to see themselves better, starting other activities, and clicking randomly to try out the dozens of TamTam instruments (they would press Enter to play one sound repeatedly). I mean, you and I would click every button to hear how it sounded; they were looking at a wall of pictures. The girl above figured out how to cycle through instruments by pressing the game keys and pressing the Enter key. I didn't even know that was possible O_O

Hacking our favorite Sugar activities

Here in Croix-des-Bouquets, we have a few activity hacks that we're eager to share with the Sugar community:

• GeoQuiz Haiti - GeoQuiz for the 10 departments of Haiti


• Crikey - a sensor-centric remix of Measure (Measure/Kasiisi updated for newer versions of Sugar)


• Memorize + Sensors - a mod of the card-matching game that lets you connect the game to real-world paper posters. First described on this blog.


• Sudoku # - Peter Hewitt's activity (link) with the board's symbols turned back into numbers for math class

Coming soon:

• Add recordable audio cues to Crikey for when a sensor reaches its max or min value.


• A well-documented class making posters for Memorize with Sensors

Super-thanks to developers for making the original activities! They are great, hackable fun.

We are finding a few quirks that can slow down a class. We will spend time explaining these to students as well as giving feedback here.

Sugar
• Hold down the left [alt] when starting an activity to open with a clean slate / new instance. This helps a lot with drawing activities (Paint, Physics).
• Writing prompt appears after almost any activity. Perhaps this should only happen if I have spent a few minutes' time, created media, or shared the activity.
• System-level muted audio problem was common in our XOs. Fix is amixer sset -q PCM "unmute 90%". Tony says Nepal added the fix to the boot sequence.

Record

• When looking at a snapshot, the live view disappears when you stop moving the cursor. This makes it appear impossible to return to the live view.

Turtle Art

• Students tend to click with the arrow tip above the block. Can we change the cursor icon or increase block size for younger students?

School starts in Haiti

School has officially begun in Haiti! From day 1, we started laptop training with an after-school program. Click below for photos from that first class:







Then today, we brought laptops to the 3rd/4th grade class and held an after-school program for the 5th/6th grade. Both were our first 1:1 class with each kid getting a laptop. Click below for photos of that class.




Naomi teaches the camera to her class


Our first lessons were the camera and the Physics activity.





In the after-school lesson, kids wanted to get into more interactive activities such as Maze and my new Haitian version of the Geoquiz activity.

Surprise Roadtrip!

On Saturday morning, I was woken by a phone call from Adam - there was a mapping roadtrip and I had an hour to give my coordinates to the driver! Fortunately I had my GPS on me, texted the guy, and soon was leaving Croix-des-Bouquets (the lowest dot on the map above). Over the next couple of days, we drove past the Peligre Dam (the next dot up), to Hinche and Pignon (the next two). Click any photo to see the full set.




It's a beautiful country out there. I took this photo at the favorite overlook of our host, the head of Habitat for Humanity in Hinche (pronounced "Hesh"). He'd gotten the idea last year to train guides to take backpackers around this part of the country. Now that they had trails planned out in Pignon ("Pii-own"), they needed online publicity. A mutual friend had gotten him in touch with the OpenStreetMap group, so we showed up to map whatever we could.

But we also saw tons more! As a civil engineer, I was excited to see the island's largest hydroelectric dam.





I also saw a different way of living. People here keep their food in a little house on stilts, like this:





We saw a film festival. This one was one of my favorites!



Then we were on the road again!





Then we were off the road!





We got out of that rut, and I came home late Sunday. Just in time for the first official day of school on Monday! Thanks everyone!

Everyone has new hats

I put down my XO and became an English teacher, Junior went from GPS back to teacher-training, a new teacher joined the school here and received an XO, we gained an American (Tony) and another American (Sally) is going home after spending more than a year in Haiti... Chaos!




Long story short: Junior (our GPS mapper Monday) is an expert on eToys from an XO-using school in Cap-Haitien (always sounds like Capsaicin to me). He said it was time to get the teachers using eToys, and he had them looking at the animated machin (car) and drawing houses, when...

Sally had to leave, and asked me to help teach her conversational English class from now on. They wanted me to explain words like wheatear, wily, and destiny. Explaining the last left me wondering about my own sense of reality. We'll be reading bits of Sally's novel, a self-help book, and one of my engineering books, "Yes is More".



One last thought is that we have to finish what we build. This post here is just a corner of a building which may never exist. There are so many in our neighborhood. We're not making another.

A walk in our neighborhood

We went for a good photo-mapping walk in the neighborhood around the school today, before the teachers' meeting.



Full Map Link

All of our photos were GPS-located by our OLPC intern, Junior. Maybe he will join COSMHA next! Here he is, mapping: