Project Outreach

Some other things that just happened this week:

• A volunteer at the Las Piedras school asked me to write to her son, who's studying programming in college. On his blog, he posts great resources for the Magallanes Classmate PCs. Argentina, are you seeing this? I told him to check out Hacker News Spanish.


• I started a conversation with WorldReader about hacking eReaders. Then I heard interesting rumors about the next generation of eReaders, so I've put it on the back burner. If I work in Seattle this fall with super secret company then I could follow up.


• I asked Garage48 if their traveling hackathon was going to visit Uganda. Now they're making plans with our OLPC contacts at Kampala University. Hoping there will be education apps and future Ugandan entrepreneurs at this event!


• I was selected for a Code for America 2012 fellowship, so I'll being making plenty of maps and apps for cities next year.

Coding, SocialCalc, and +1

Programming is weird. You have to make a mental connection with the computer to really understand what it's doing. Similar to Scout reading the cobra's mind in Scout's Safari.

Yesterday I added a "+1" feature to the digital library; basically a Facebook like button. I spent a minute on the icon, and much more time getting it to appear

Me gusta eso libro

On May 2, a teacher made me promise to fix SocialCalc. On Friday I had almost solved the problem, but hit a dead end. At the code jam on Sunday, Tony Anderson of OLE Rwanda helped me walk through the traces and meanderings of what experts call "spaghetti code". By the end of that day, it looked like we found a route around the problem. After a few design and translation updates today, SocialCalc is fixed! The code is on SugarLabs and you can download the activity.