(photo by Jacob Rus)

We, at Solution Grove, are advocates of Open Source software.  A good use of Open Source is to teach kids how to program.  One such example of Open Source is the Etoys activity from the Squeakland Foundation.  

Etoys, is an educational tool that teaches kids some powerful ideas.  It is a free software program that runs on almost all personal computers.  Using Etoys, children make their own models, stories, and games.  They learn math, science, and language arts the fun and effective way.

Read the full posts here and here about how children as well as adults at the Squeakfest '09 learned Etoys to explore and acquire more knowledge.

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(photo by Sugar FOSS Manual)

I'm going to try to post more about our progress as we get Sugar on a Stick ready for prime time. I'm going to try a sweet and sour formula

Record - http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081

I played with Record on my iMac today.

The Sweet:

• Video worked on my iMac

The Sour:

• Audio doesn't work yet
• Video quality isn't great - but alsroot thinks he knows how to fix that!

Why should we care?

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(photo by CuriousLee)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 22 /PRNewswire/ --

Sugar Labs(TM) announces the availability for testing of Sugar on a Stick Beta-1. This version of the free open-source Sugar Learning Platform, available at http://www.sugarlabs.org for loading on any 1 Gb or greater USB stick, is designed to facilitate exploration of the award-winning Sugar interface beyond its original platform, the One Laptop per Child XO-1, to such varied hardware as aging PCs and recent Macs to the latest netbooks.

Teachers and parents interested in trying Sugar with children can download the Sugar on a Stick beta-1 file from the Sugar Labs website and load it onto a USB stick by following the instructions at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick.

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On Friday, Walter Bender, Pablo Flores from Uruguay, and I went to FOSSVT - Vermont's Open Source and Education Conference.  We handed out Sugar on a Stick and it worked!

It worked on the eeePCs, it worked on the Dells big and small, it worked on the think pads, it worked on the classmate.  It worked on the HP tablet, including the touchscreen! It didn't work on one of the little HP netbooks but that was our only complete fail.  We had problems with accessing wireless on a few models.  One laptop needed the boot helper CD.

We had a room full of people doing Turtle Art!  It was wonderful.

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(photo by Americas Quarterly)

Project CEIBAL is Uruguay's one laptop per child initiative.

 Here are some details:

"This makes CEIBAL different from previous efforts to bridge the digital divide in Uruguay. It combines the distribution of computers with a program to train teachers in the cognitive skills needed to use IT for maximum benefit. It is not oriented toward creating an IT-friendly environment merely inside the classroom, but also outside: students are expected to take laptops home so that the computer can then be shared among family members."

"To date, we have delivered 151,918 XO computers—low-power laptops that operate with flash memory and a Linux operating system—to students in public schools in Uruguay. By the end of 2009 one laptop will be delivered to each of the 301,143 students and 12,879 teachers in Uruguay’s 2,064 public schools. Students with mental, visual, hearing, or motor disabilities—as well as their schools—will also receive computers specifically tailored to meet their needs. CEIBAL’s total initial cost, financed entirely by the Uruguayan state, is $100 million (each computer costs $220). In addition to that, the government will spend $15 million annually for the program’s maintenance and continuity. "

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(photo by wiki.laptop.org)

Solution Grove is in the process of testing an installation of the XO School Server (XS) of the OLPC project.  Since I don't have an XO laptop, I needed to emulate one.  I'm already running several virtual machines using VirtualBox so it makes sense that I go that route for an emulated XO.

I've outlined below the steps I did to emulate XO on VirtualBox.  The steps here will most likely work with VMWare as well just by changing VirtualBox specific steps to their VMWare counterparts.  These were researched and accumulated on the wiki.laptop.org and sugarlabs.org wiki pages. Some parts are copied verbatim and attribution go to their original authors.

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