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: