One Laptop Per Child News

A fan of MIT Scratch has developed a project viewer for the iPhone!

This month, we are back at the Arlington Career Center (ACC) with an introductory workshop on the MIT Media Lab's fabulous (and free) Scratch 1.4 interactive animation software and a reprise of last month's XO laptop repair clinic.

When: Saturday, March 20th, 2010, 1 pm to 4 pm
Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info)

We will start the meeting with an 90-minute introductory workshop on Scratch, the multimedia interactive programming software developed by the MIT Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten Group and used by thousands of children, parents and teachers all over the world.

The interface and features of Scratch will be covered, and participants will be able to create and upload an animated greeting card. The Scratch software runs on Windows, Macintosh and Linux, so it can be used by virtually anyone who owns a computer. As pictured above, there is even a viewer app that runs on Apple's iPhone, iTouch and the upcoming iPad.

Luke Faraone, who runs our OLPC DC Repair Center, will do another XO repair clinic to review the takeapart and reassembly procedures (bring a philips head screwdriver and an XO if you want to participate) and help with any specific repairs visitors may need.

We have limited quantities of spare parts for purchase. Some of the new early production XO-1.5 laptops have arrived and we will have some on display.

Upcoming

On May 22nd, we'll spend the entire day celebrating Scratch Day 2010 at the Arlington Career Center. Please save the date!

A few of us will gather at the Arlington Career Center the weekend of March 27-28 to update the text and some images of the old web start pages for the XO-1 laptop. More info here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Start

Our next meeting is tentatively scheduled for April 17 at Gallaudet University.

I understand that the "March madness" that comes with closing the financial year on the 31st March has brought some good news for OLPC India.

Happiness with XO madness

• One industrial house has ordered 25000 laptops over the year 2010 out of which 2000 have been ordered to be in place by 31st March.
• Another industrialist has offered a fully furnished office space for 10 professionals, managers and the leadership of OLPC India along with putting all the professionals on their payroll.
• Yet another industrial house has ordered to roll out to 10,000 children from the 2009-19 budget and another 40,000 from the 2010-11 budget.

While there may be more, I thought of sharing with you what has been firmed up and may require many of the OLPC enthusiasts an opportunity to work with the implementation challenges this year.

S Adhikari posted this update to the OLPC India listserv

One of the most innovative design paradigms of Sugar is the simplicity of its user interface. Mainstream UI design in personal computing currently uses complex 3D components, with a combination of useful depth perspective, and less useful animated transitions. Icons get their share of animated effects too.

Compared to this, Sugar is plain simple. No 3D effects, the UI is plain 2D, with strong contrasted colors. Icons and buttons are also very simple, a white circle with a symbol in the middle. For example the browser looks extremely simple:

Now, we may wonder if the reason for such simplicity is the audience towards Sugar is directed: Children. Possibly. However, the very same design paradigms starts surfacing in the mobile market, from a very unlikely company: Microsoft.

The same company that pushes the complex Aero in Windows Vista and 7, it is now proposing a very simple and clean UI design for the new Windows Phone 7 series. How simple? If we look at for example a screen shot of Internet Explorer, we might notice how strikingly similar to Sugar:

Note how the simple white buttons on dark background are practically the same as those in Sugar. Similar design choices are present in the home screen, which is clean and with simple colors and blocky sections.

I don't think we should call for conspiracy theories here. Probably Microsoft realized that in a small screen, sometimes simple is better. Sugar provides a very usable yet simple UI, and combined with the innovative screen, it can be arguably considered as the first multi-purpose e-reader.

I am sure it served at some point as an inspiration for Windows Phone 7. As e-reader become more and more common, we should hope that more OS manufacturers will consider Sugar's UI elements. And why not? Maybe they'll use Sugar's UI directly.

"OLPC is a failed solution"... "Dead in the water"

1:1 laptop use works

Students who have participated in 1:1 computing report higher achievement and increased engagement. This new collection of articles brings together some of the best evidence to date on the implementation and impacts of 1:1 computing.

All of the studies that examined the impact of 1:1 computing on student achievement found that students in the 1:1 settings outperformed their traditional classroom peers on English/Language Arts standardized tests by a statistically significant margin. Study authors also reported on evidence of increased student motivation and engagement, as well as changes in teachers' instructional practices.