One Laptop Per Child News

Resumen en español al final del artículo

A team of students from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago has been working on a charging station for XO deployments in developing countries. Like the laptops themselves, the design needed to be rugged and inexpensive, but also simple enough to be reproduced in their area of deployment. Using a three-legged PVC structure, hardboard shelves, and dulled nails for support, the final cost of each charging station ended up being under $1.00 per XO when constructed in the US; and when using a simple jig, the construction time is under an hour for a station with 20 shelves.

In August 2011, the team installed a solar power system at a primary school in Lascahobas, Haiti. Upon returning in December, the site was updated with, among other things, the new charging station design. Previously, all 400 XOs had been stacked in piles of ten, which proved to be a mess (as seen in the first picture below). With the new stations installed, the children were able to easily find available charging cables and plug the XOs into the system.

An assembly guide for building these XO laptop charging stations is available in two different versions: 11x17 one-pager / multiple 8.5x11 pages.

IIT Empowering Haiti is a team of undergraduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology who, with the support of faculty and industry advisers, are working to improve the conditions of education in Haiti. For more information you please visit the team's Web site or contact them at contact@iitempoweringhaiti.org.

Resumen en español: El equipo de IIT Empowering Haiti construyo un sistema de estaciónes para poder recargar los 400 XO en una escuela en Haiti. El costo del sistema es menos que $1 por XO y existen un guia para que cualquier otro proyecto puede replicar este sistema: una página / seis páginas.

While we all lust for OLPC's new XO 3.0 tablet computer, don't forget that XO-1 laptops are selling for cheap on eBay and the prices are dropping fast.

As you can see by the closed auction above, XO laptops are going for $90 or less now. Three years after Give One Get One, OLPC has finally achieved the $100 laptop goal - get yours today!

English summary at the end of the article

Gracias a un post en la pagina de Plan Ceibal en Facebook vi este video sobre una calesita que se diseño para cargar unas XO en una escuela del departamento de Flores en Uruguay:

La calesita surge de un proyecto escolar iniciado en el 2010 por niños de 3er año de escuela en conjunto con una maestra, la directora y un voluntario de RAP Ceibal. Durante dos años estuvieron trabajando para concretar su proyecto. El mismo permitió nuevos abordajes de temáticas referentes a ciencia, energías renovables, medioambiente, entre otros.

Ya hemos visto muchos proyectos interesantes en cuanto a la produción de electricidad para las XO:

• en la India se usaron vacas
• en Afganistán se construyó algo parecido a una máquina de coser
• en Paraguay y la India se adaptaron fuentes de alimentación de computadoras de escritorio
• en Haiti se diseño una instalación solar para 500 XO
• y la otra semana OLPC publicó un video de una XO que esta corriendo de un panel solar y sin batería

Lo que me encanta en particular sobre este proyecto es la participación de los alumnos en la construcción de la calesita y creo que también se nota su interés en el video:

English summary: Over a two year period pupils, a teacher, a principal, and a volunteer at a school in Uruguay built a carousel which can charge several XOs when in-use. This is just the latest example of a series of interesting projects to design alternative ways to charge XOs and I particularly like the pupils' involvement here.

Giving them OLPC laptops, not just any computer, transforms their world beyond what a teacher and a regular computer could achieve together. My experience is that wherever we have OLPC deployed, virtually anyone visiting those schools has almost had an "spiritual" experience of what learning learning can be.

How children can be engaged in learning by themselves, as a class and engage the teachers as well... It transforms the school from a place where children are forced to go into a place they don't want to go away from.

OLPC and SFSU will use their best efforts to establish a long-term cooperation and collaboration in the field of 1:1 computing in certain primary schools in California and around the world. OLPC is interested in pursuing opportunities in the areas of Education, Technology and Outreach.

The Parties agree to work together to support the San Francisco Bay Area volunteer community through its monthly meetings, lending library and annual summit. Further, the parties agree to support faculty research, community service, student projects and internships in the OLPC context. These may include, but are not limited to pedagogical approaches, content generation, software development, hardware testing, network analysis, community outreach and other related topics that go towards ensuring the sustainability of OLPC in different parts of the world.