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.

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

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.

This week in Haiti

I had the idea to do a laptop tear-down in front of the 5th-6th grade class. One of the laptops got a broken screen on the airplane, and another had a misfit touchpad. Junior and I each took a laptop so we could put the good parts together. Photos by Tony!







Tony, George, and Adam left. So Junior and I are OLPC Haiti for the next 10 days! A few days before they left, a 1st grader stopped by to talk about the laptop, and I got this photo:



I used my extra responsibility to set up a clearer schedule and run some new after-school activities. I tried out some new lessons with audiobooks, typing, and sensors. Here are a couple of photos:

Quizzed and Quizzical

The past three days of our classes have focused on using the laptops to quiz students on their teachers' lessons. Grades 1-2 are learning the colors, 3-4 were adding three-digit numbers, and 5-6 were conjugating French verbs. The quizzes are on the school server, so we are training the students to open the Learn activity, find their class, and download resources. New students arrive each day, unfamiliar with the computers, so our continued progress is truly remarkable.



Decorating with Turtle blocks

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Working together to solve math problems

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Natalie helps a student add accents to a French conjugation

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See additional photos from George on BuildingASchool.org

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.

Maker Faire wrap up

I'm on my way home from my second-ever visit to Maker Faire and my first time as an official Maker! Response was overwhelmingly positive and many kids and adults were drawn in by Sugar activities and our sensor setups. Walking around, I got to meet Sparkfun, Squishy Circuits, RobotGrrl, Let's Make Robots, and Raspberry Pi, who all are part of this tremendous effort to make engineering kid-friendly.

Here are a few photos from my phone. I have more on my camera that I will post in a few minutes.

My Mission in Haiti

With Haiti's great need of relief and reform, many are seeking food, shelter, and medical care. The world has responded with the largest contingent of volunteers in the world, outside of India (NYT Sept 6). Of the million homeless counted after the earthquake in 2010, hundreds of thousands have left tent cities. Between June and July of this year, 6% of tent dwellers moved into new shelters. What's next?



Both local and global organizations now look to long-term programs. Specifically, what does it mean to be educated in Haiti? In primary school, which is a crucial time for literacy, schools and curricula are fairly independent, something similar to private preschools in the US. Parents take it upon themselves to find a school near home which meets expectations for their children. The general consensus is that organizing and monitoring these schools would improve literacy and increase the number of students who continue their education.

A few years ago, Haiti received laptops from One Laptop per Child to modernize their schools and attempt equal access to education throughout the country. Since then, volunteers from Waveplace and the Illinois Institute of Technology have expanded these projects with new schools and activities. See olpcMAP of Haiti.


CC-BY One Laptop per Child

My goal for OLPC Haiti is trifold: to continue schools' interest in their computers, to develop and share new resources for literacy and creativity, and to show how technology can be part of a national education strategy for Haiti. For example, I will be taking @aiclass to test using online classes to train and assist teachers.



Last weekend, I met several OpenStreetMap volunteers who have made a remarkably innovative and to-the-minute map of Haiti. In only two days, they made the changes shown above. The UN and a handful of others have tapped into OpenStreetMap, but others remain unaware of the data or what can be built on top of it. The lines and shades of an online map are an echo of the real-life situation. I want to develop maps with a new level of detail and perspective, so we can begin to address and change what we see. Some maps you'll see will be made for and by kids, and others will only make sense to engineers.




I believe in a third component, not yet realized in Haiti, that is sometimes called the Maker Movement. In an appearance on Adafruit's Show-and-Tell (video will appear here) and our upcoming booth at Maker Faire NYC, I make the case for do-it-yourself electronics, both as a tactile introduction to technology and as a realistic future for developing nations. I am bringing new sensors and new materials beyond what was seen in Uganda and Uruguay. This one initiative can cross over into many others. A Wiimote can take the place of a keyboard and mouse for novice mapmakers. Sewable electronics hold potential for Haiti's artists and crafts markets. And it will become clear that technology lives to be adapted, not consumed. Just as Mozilla has moved away from reading webpages to teaching the world to code (both why and how), Haitian schools can make a difference by moving from prescribed to open education.

Singularity Kids

Latitude has a great presentation of kids' answers to " draw what would you like your computer to do that it can't do now"




The points I'm taking from this:

• Researchers: Kids are either players or makers, in that some ideas were new types of games and experiences, and others were tools for creating or doing something
• They interviewed kids on all six major continents, including classes in South Africa, India, Argentina, and Colombia. None of the drawings in the presentation seemed biased to one region. When asked about regional differences, the researchers say India had more "maker" than "player" ideas.
• "Nearly 40%" of ideas connect the virtual and physical worlds. Great news for the Map, Measure, and Memorize with Sensors activities. Huge motivation for us to continue in this direction, especially if someone can figure out haptics (touch)
• A third of ideas "expanded the student's knowledge or creativity". They show XO laptops for this slide. Many of the "maker" students want to paint and touch their work on screen, and have it in real life. The life-size interactive storybook they showed from MIT looks beautiful.

Awesome