The latest from Lascahobas

Currently at Lascahobas. I spent the first two days in Haiti visiting Silar's orphanage and getting our solar power equipment from different places in Port-au-Prince. I was mostly along for the ride - one of our teachers, Jeanide, led the way. We also visited a tablet manufacturer/assembler and talked to their head engineer, who talked me into buying a solar panel with integrated mobile backup battery. Yesterday Sora came into Port-au-Prince, then we traveled out into the countryside to visit the school in Lascahobas. Sora and the teachers discussed the project in Creole until after dark. I debugged some issues with internet, and went on the roof to check on the solar panels. I was then up past midnight writing some writing helpers into the iLoominate eBook project. Long day! Today is the first actual workshop day - our software is running on the server, teachers are meeting, Sora has ordered lunch for everyone. I'll be taking a look at the solar power system, with George and Tim joining by Skype

Going to Silar's and Lascahobas

Hey, this is Nick! Haven't been laptop-blogging in a while. I'm going back to Haiti tomorrow (the 14th). It's only for a week, but I get to see two awesome schools: Silar's and Lascahobas!

For the first couple of days I'll be at Silar's, inside Port-au-Prince, and after that I will be helping facilitate a teacher workshop in more rural Lascahobas (the upper right XO on the map). Along the way, I'm planning to meet a company making Android tablet in Haiti, help repair a solar power system, and map a couple of health centers.

About that tablet project...

One of the highlights of OLPC-SF was an update on OLPC's Ethiopian tablet experiment, directly from the engineers working on the project. This is an ambitious project where OLPC has taken great pains to be as hands-off as possible, while collecting meaningful data. They built resilient hardware in a village with perhaps no literate adults. They also developed and collected technology that speaks to kids ( taking inspiration from The Diamond Age, which was a fascinating read on my OLPC Uganda trip ).

Nicholas Negroponte's media circuit, though, doesn't sit right with me.

In an article reaching the front page of Reddit and Hacker News, we are told "OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing tablets... Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day... Within five months, they had hacked Android." The press repeats these numbers, these timelines, these factoids.

Stories like this are setting up the project for failure. I'll limit myself to five points:

1) OLPC built a solar charging station and instructed children to charge the tablets daily. The project depends on this training. How much time was spent on construction and training? Would it work better with twice as much training? If so, the "dropping off tablets" idea is more stunt than strategy.

2) 47 apps / tablet / day is a silly number - an average over an unknown time. If months into the program, children still use their tablets like this, then they are overwhelmed with choices. Tell us: how long do they use content? Are they engaged? Do they get better at a literacy game over time?

"Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them."

3) No way. OLPC's engineers chose the Xoom tablet because its charger could not be repurposed for villagers' and truckers' mobile phones. Yes: remote African villages do have motor vehicles, phones, radios, and Coca-Cola. OLPC has outdone themselves in finding a location far more remote than I traveled in Uganda, and I believe what OLPC has said about literacy and lack of education in the village. Even considering that, I would be astonished if children had never seen letters before.

4) "Hacking Android": OLPC set up a monitoring system, the children got around it by activating some mode or setting, and OLPC doesn't know how. It's a little funny, but not learning.

5) There's some conflation between this project's use of the Motorola Xoom and the proposed OLPC tablet. The OLPC tablets exist, their hardware is interesting, but the software is not touch-ready. I've always liked the idea of OLPC's custom software disrupting education from within, but there's a reason that the Ethiopia project chose Android.

Please... this is such a cool project. Tell us meaningful metrics, good and bad. Talk about the engineering. Talk to us about how you see this experiment leading to learning. Tell us about the choice to use Android, and stick with it. That's all.

Posts from Map Wiki

I was checking my server logs today and was surprised to see edits to an OLPC Map Wiki. For a short time in 2010-2011, I had an OLPC Map Wiki link (named "Our Maps") in the Map Activity. Markers were public by default. There was a private group option, but it was never used. If someone is editing the map now, they must have downloaded the activity a while ago, and never have updated. Some are blank or nonsensical, but a few since April 2011 are actual labels:

club atletico chilecito - Chilecito, La Rioja, Argentina

EE.UU. - Saskatchewan, Canada

Catedral - Parroquia Catedral, Tacuarembo, Uruguay

Uruguay Sudamerica Amca Mundo - Uruguay

iglecia nuestra mi casa - Pan de Azucar, Uruguay

mi casa (and a short distance away) amigo - Ometepe Island, Nicaragua

eslindo - Tacuarembo, Uruguay

es lindo - Portugal

un pais orible - Antarctica

On the dawn of Apple Maps

Apple is launching a Maps app tomorrow, supplanting Google as the standard map on millions of future iPhones and iPads. It occurred to me during dinner that tomorrow may be the biggest day in mapping since the launch of the iPhone, or even of Google Maps itself. Months or years from now, people will be asking me "can we add this to the iPhone map?" or maybe "should our app use Google or Apple?"

As an avid supporter of OpenStreetMap, I acknowledge their network of volunteers and applications, but there's no one day which defines them. It's also possible Apple will use OpenStreetMap data, as they did in iPhoto. If so, we can expect a wave of interest, contributions, and corporate data uploads to transform the site. Hopefully Apple has learned from the mistakes they made back in March:

Footpaths indistinguishable from roads on Apple Maps (Mar 2012)

I'm not worried for Google... in addition to Android, the web, and their API, they must have a plan to keep iPhone users on their system. But let's remember that Google Maps was one of the few apps you could have on the first iPhone in 2007-2008; Maps was one of its greatest selling points. Apple has decided not to let that continue any farther. Not because of iOS vs. Android, but because location is valuable, because (as I said a year ago) "Apple doesn't have a market for real world places". Apple is taking a bet that they understand mobile better than Google, and they can succeed there, like Instagram and Path taking on Facebook on mobile devices. I doubt they'll add their own reviews or check-ins or StreetViews... Instead they may surprise us with better location-aware apps, notifications, and smart caching for faster searches.

It's entirely possible that on day one, Apple Maps will look clunky and incomplete compared to Google. Apple failed to make a dent on social networking with Ping, and Nokia Maps never caught on in the US. But if Apple places itself in the Maps app, plus maps in iOS native apps, millions will be using it daily. And what happens if you aren't on that map?

Cities for Coders

At Code for America, a great deal of thought goes into what's possible with apps. But I miss the reflection which came with OLPC, the question of where programmers come from in the first place.

It's actually super-relevant to our work in cities, because not every city fosters a programming community. Most cities have a dedicated and hard-working IT department, but local coders provide the lifeline for new ideas and skills, an unofficial partner in apps and hackathons. Think of RAP Ceibal's work in Uruguay.

My city team's strategy focused on a local university. I made a few appearances at MUGTUG, a late-night CS meeting where students share projects centered around Google APIs. In the future, we hope to drive this group to develop a musical map of the city ( something technical, but not overwhelming ). But for the most part, CS students aren't taught languages of the web. It's so odd - I mean, the world is web. But two weeks ago, a Berkeley grad student told me that she'd quit Codecademy, because her professor wants her to focus on Python.

My own experience? I like learning while working - the start-up way. This year I have completely overhauled how I make websites. Even maps!

I'm also working on what might make Codecademy's JavaScript classes ring true for more people. You're invited to try Rainy Day Coder and learn JavaScript on rainy nights and weekends! You'll get mail at most twice in a week. You should get the right city automatically - if not, put in your zipcode.

Storytelling Workshop, Haiti

This week, OLPC school École Shalom was part of a multi-school workshop by Dr. Terri Bucci to improve schools' education methods and introduce new interactive lesson plans. One of their main focuses was storytelling. By reading out loud and giving the students individual copies to review, the teachers could spark discussions in their class. There were two interactive activities with each book: putting the pages back in order, and matching the text to the illustrations.



We met at this church:



During the read-aloud of one story about a mole and a hedgehog, one of the researchers asked if the teachers knew about the animals. They hadn't. A few explanations later, we were back on the tracks. It's a good reminder that some elements of a story might not translate the way we'd like ( another example: Khan Academy's math lessons with avocados ). But does a story need to be rewritten every time it crosses national borders? There was a superb point from another researcher that stories can be a tool for us find out about other places and their cultures. Hmmm.

I also met Dr. Kranch and a student who are developing a lesson-builder for the teachers and the schools' tech people ( like Junior and Lorinord here ). They took interest in the Fedora Linux / XS school server / HTML+JS stack we were using to deliver lessons and quizzes to our students. The HTML+JS side makes it compatible with computers they are introducing in a few other schools. I need to send them a write-up of how we run it, and what parts need the most streamlining.



Today I biked south to the point where the river disappears between two mountains, something I'd only seen in the distance in my last trip. Google Maps Link Heading that way, you reach sheer cliffs and a dam where the river is diverted into irrigation canals. Here and there you see people shoveling rocks into piles. Eventually I reached a point where I could go no further without walking in the river. Soon after I took the picture above, a mining truck appeared, driving down the middle of the river. No safe passage for bikes.

Climbing Higher

After four months away, I am making a brief return to École Shalom in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti. This is my new backyard:


See larger photo

My project this week is to assist Dr. Terri Bucci, who visited our laptop class in November, and her team researching a math curriculum that could be loaded onto the XO laptops.

It's my first time returning to a deployment, and I am slowly but surely recalling my Kreyòl Ayisyen words and phrases. A few students actually recognized me! Photos and details to come.

Changing Gears

I am flying to San Francisco to join Code for America! This initiative - just entering its second year - develops and adapts open source tools and resources for cities. We aim to make cities participatory down to bits and bytes. Throughout the year I am going to be working directly with officials in Macon, Georgia.



Though you'd never mistake Macon for Chicago or Seattle, the city has a major role to play. Smaller cities often struggle to develop and maintain their technology. They don't have the in-house techies to make apps like a big city does. What grows strong roots in Macon can spread and grow in hundreds of cities, like dandelion seeds blowing into the wind.



CC-BY-SA Alexdi

Any OLPC / Sugar updates will continue appearing here. For CfA updates follow @mapmeld on Twitter.

Mapping Haiti Update

A recurring theme in my trip to Haiti was maps. So much so that "are you mapping this, Nick?" became something of a running joke.

Mapping a broken well

Over time, we became interested in mapping tap taps, Haiti's informal transit system. National routes are a wheel-and-spoke network with Port-au-Prince as its center. But when you zoom in on Port-au-Prince, a complicated network of short links emerges. To travel from one part of the city to another, travelers must have a mental map of which stations fall between their starting point and destination. To go somewhere new, you must find someone who knows the path. It turned out that these everyday conversations were the best way to introduce Haitians to sharing information about mapping Port-au-Prince.

Watson mapping a well

For awhile the data was collected but remained difficult to share or even see. If you followed instructions on a wiki, you could see something like this:



With Andy Allan's development of transit tiles for OpenStreetMap, this project was ready to make a leap forward. With some early-morning hacking with Adam over Skype, we put together TapTapMap.org just in time for the OpenHaiti summit.

Ecole Shalom: Programming Strategy

As part of my work at École Shalom, I drafted a one-page strategy to introduce computing skills in each grade, from our 1st grade keyboard lessons to 5th/6th grade getting a bite of Python code. The idea is to give teachers and the principal a picture of how the computers can be used and how students learn more and more about each activity. Although teachers were already using the computers for quizzes and presentations, we wanted to show them some more creative lessons that computers are specially equipped to teach.

Intro and link follow:

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One of the main goals of the OLPC volunteers is to support activities at all levels of Ecole Shalom's education programs which go beyond passive use of computers and focus on:

• creating content


• redesigning systems / programs


• planning methods / algorithms

These are the fundamental skills necessary for programming and computer science, and they're just as useful for a variety of science, engineering, and math fields.

Full programming strategy

With much thanks to SparkFun =)

Some of our most innovative work with sensors and computing in Haiti came from our Arduinos and a USB weather sensor.

Teacher-trainer Junior demonstrates weather sensor

I modified the learn-Python activity, Pippy, to include a weather program. The same program has options to read the serial output of the sensor in English, French, or Haitian Creole. You can download this modified program (warning - overwrites your existing examples in French!) at http://mapmeld.appspot.com/Pippy-French.xo

A 6th grade student reads light level on an outdoor balcony

The weather sensor is part of our Programming Strategy, a plan to introduce creative and scientific concepts from kindergarten up to graduation from École Shalom =)

We also experimented with an Arduino electronics board. The modified Pippy activity is fully equipped to talk to the Arduino over the USB/serial cable.

RFID-tagged drawings make the XO speak the student's name and their drawing's subject

The weather sensor and an Arduino kit are from SparkFun Electronics, whom we met at the NYC Maker Faire. They're great - thank you so much!

Back in the USA

It had to happen: I returned to the US. Here I am at the airport with Junior.



Before then, Adam and I biked up a mountain. This mountain, actually:



At the top, you could see the whole plain: the ocean, Port-au-Prince, Croix-des-Bouquets, Double Harvest, and more. Photos to come later.

What else? We did an RFID/NFC project with some kids:



and I learned how to sew! Awesome.

Westward to Petit-Goave

I spent this Sunday traveling to a potential new microfinance site outside the Haitian city of Petit-Goave. To put it in perspective with some earlier trips, it's the bottom left marker on this map of places I've been:



This was mostly a mapping trip. Every sign, every well, every school and bakery I could capture on camera will soon be recorded on OpenStreetMap.



I also got to try douce marcos, a chewy local delicacy. Here's the business's sign and their latitude/longitude on OpenStreetMap.



But there plenty of other photos which I took for the sake of the view:

Perception of Difficulty

How experienced I feel when I start working on someone else's code:



Or even this:

(CC-BY-SA-NC Wayan Vota)

How I feel when I actually find and fix the bug:

Flower Bridge: neat hacktivity

As a civil engineering major, I am a huge fan of the Bridge activity, the winner of a Physics Game Jam organized by OLPC.



The kids at Ecole Shalom have no trouble with the Physics activity, but Bridge requires much more precise mouse motions and clicks. I showed it to a few students and they enjoyed the mechanics and sound effects, but we didn't get any bridges built.

Last week, I got the idea to change up the game. As you play, flowers rise up and you can use them as supports for your bridge. I connected the flowers' growth to a solar sensor. Put your computer in the sun, and the flowers will grow and support the bridge. Watch out for clouds and saboteur classmates, because without sunlight those flowers will wilt away! ALSO to stop kids from cheating by connecting the sensor leads, the maximum flower height is too high for a train to climb.



See images from our classes

Big day for literacy and education

Today we welcomed Dr. Terri Bucci and other educators to Ecole Shalom. Terri is running a teacher-training seminar in town tomorrow, and several of our teachers will be there, so we decided to demonstrate how the XO laptops could be used to promote literacy in the Haitian Creole language.



For reading material, we used an illustrated story kindly offered to us by the IOM. Vivid pictures explained the situation (a mother and baby seeking shelter from a cyclone) and vital safety information. As the class read through the story, I asked questions about what was happening, and directed kids to mimic sounds that the character might hear. We noticed that students in the back row were doing most of the reading, so I asked the front two rows to complete the story. All in all, this had to be one of our best classes in terms of engagement and participation from the kids.



That group had to leave, but later in the day we held a grammar class with 5th and 6th grade, followed by an after-school sensors project with 1st and 2nd graders. This is building up to a larger project where we can use Crikey (the modified Measure activity that I'm working on) to respond to sensors with recorded sounds. I also want to add to our set of sensor-based activities by working with the Physics and Bridge activities.

Hope and Holidays in Haiti

Due to holidays on November 1 and 2, there were only three days of school this week. By working closely with the teachers, we still taught a computer lesson to each grade and held great after-school sessions.



Kindergarteners are learning a new color each week. These activities use interesting visuals and also help children learn French. There are small differences between French and Creole words for fruits such as the papaya, articles of clothing, and even the colors themselves. Migueline, the kindergarten teacher, leads the kids in a song incorporating each item in the pictures.



Older students are learning to type by writing down details of stories such as La Paysanne and La cuisse de poulet. I downloaded the public-domain audiobooks from LibriVox and play them in sync on a few computers. The students tell us to pause the story whenever they hear a new character, and then they type that character's name into Write. They even help each other type faster so they can continue listening to the story!



We also did a mapping lesson during a visit by officials from the American embassy. We had a good talk about how OLPC can change the ways teachers educate, from the old style of rote memorization to participatory education with room for discovery, individualization, and science. See more on BuildingASchool.org

OLPC-SF from Haiti

Hey everyone in SF - your posters look great! Glad I could join you live from Port-au-Prince via Skype. Thanks to Julie Blaustein for these and more great photos:



I used the chat to introduce my plan to get the laptops used more in class. We've been meeting most students once during the day and twice after school each week, based on teachers' ideas for what we can teach. This time around, I offered the teachers two "wildcard" classes which they could request for their students: taking apart an XO and listening to a poem. Naomi picked the former for grades 3-4, and we decided Cesar's class, grade 2, would enjoy the poem.

On my way back to school, I got to visit an art festival. Seeing artwork on display and in progress honestly made my weekend.

Memorize + Sensors, Explained

Ever since I proposed Memorize with Sensors, reactions have varied from "that's so cool!" to "what is this I don't even...?" Now that this hack-tivity is released, it's time for a step-by-step guide to how and why to set it up yourself.

1) Draw a poster with many parts (countries, continents, parts of the body...) but don't label anything.



2) Embed resistors in each item on the poster. Each resistor should be different, and measurable by the XO. Putting your resistors in series or parallel can give you extra measurable areas.



3) Create a new 1-2 deck in Memorize. Wire up your microphone port to a resistor and click the Measure icon to add a resistor value. Only use values between +/-32000.



4) Also click the Speak icon so the XO will read the name on the card.

5) Repeat 3-4 for each resistor on your poster.

6) Re-make the game if you move to a room with very different humidity.