1st OLPC Vietnam developers meeting

Hi all,
we were around 15 people for the 1st meeting of OLPC Vietnam developers.
I put some pictures of the event here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=221797&id=538054947&l=7d2be59155

I made a short presentation of the OLPC project and a report of my
visit to the Vung Vieng village.
My slides (report of the VV village visit) are available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/visit-to-vung-vieng-village-olpc-vietnam

The conclusions of my visit are as following:
- every XOs are working and are used everyday by kids. They really enjoyed it.
- XOs are not part of a curriculum. This is more a leisure actitivity
at the moment.
- there is a problem with the local teachers: they only stay one year
in the village. We need to train them every year. Teachers need to be
more involved in the use of XOs in the classroom.
- Only a limited set of activities seems to be used by the children.
There is not enough vietnamese activities
- XOs need to be update to newer versions of Sugar (0.82.1 => 0.88).
We need to select specific activities (with good vn translation) and
write some pedagogical documentation.

We also made some demos of the Sugar environment (on Linux & XOs).
Some students present at the meeting are particularly interested in
developing Sugar applications.

One of the conclusion of this meeting is that we need to grow the
user&developer Sugar community in order to have more vietnamese
contents. This will be one our top priorities of the next months.

Regards
--
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://doesnotunderstand.org/
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Le 09/06/2010 12:09, Serge Stinckwich a écrit :

> The conclusions of my visit are as following:
> - every XOs are working and are used everyday by kids. They really enjoyed it.

Great to know that.

> - XOs are not part of a curriculum. This is more a leisure actitivity
> at the moment.

As there are not enough XOs and that children cannot bring them home,
using the XOs for leisure activities (in rotation?) seems OK here.

> - there is a problem with the local teachers: they only stay one year
> in the village. We need to train them every year. Teachers need to be
> more involved in the use of XOs in the classroom.

This calls for developing short manuals about the XOs and about Sugar at
the minimum. These manuals already exist on Flossmanuals and can be
translated there:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/

It's also easy to copy paste the web pages to produce editable ODT
documents that can be easily modified and translated. The bulk of the
Sugar document is made of screenshots.

> - Only a limited set of activities seems to be used by the children.
> There is not enough vietnamese activities

About primary activities that could use vietnamese language, reading
vietnamese children books (e.g. PDF format) could be developed.

Many starting activities do not really need writing yet, for young
children especially.

If there are young parents among Hanoilug, or if you know of young
parents, it would be useful that you test and promote the use of Sugar
with young children (Sugar has been designed for children from 6 to 12
years old : that's quite a range. But you can always give to younger
children to use as some activities could already be used, under
guidance, for 4 years old children).

You do not need to have an XOs to use Sugar : you can either use Sugar
on a Stick (live USB but with no persistent file) or Trisquel with Sugar
on Toast (live USB with persistent file), or have a dual installation of
Trisquel 3.5 Arwen (based on Ubuntu 9.10), then install the package
trisquel-sugar to have a functional Sugar session environment (do not
test yet on Lucid Lynx => some issues with the mouse click).

You can contact me to have "Sugar on a Stick Mirabelle", Trisquel-Toast
or Trisquel 3.5 Arwen installed as a live USB (1 GB).

Links:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast
http://trisquel.info/



--
M. VU DO Quynh
AUF (Tổ chức hợp tác ĐH Pháp ngữ)
Campus numérique francophone (CNF) de Hanoi
Nhà D, ngõ 42 Tạ Quang Bửu
Tél.: (84-4) 38.68.48.85 ; Fax: (84-4) 38.69.45.09
http://www.vn.refer.org/vietnam/

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