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I bought an XO-1 from the first "Give One Get One" promotion many years ago. I was a bit disappointed with it, but I learned to write Activities for Sugar and eventually wrote a book on the subject which you may check out here:

https://archive.org/details/Ma...

I used my XO-1 as an e-book reader and was so pleased with it and all the thousands of free e-books available from archive.org and Project Gutenberg that I learned to create and donate books to these sites and wrote a book on that subject:

https://archive.org/details/EB...

I also wrote a few Activities for the platform. So did many others, including some children. You can check them all out here:

http://activities.sugarlabs.or...

You can also check out Sugar itself, easily. Your Linux distribution probably includes it. You can run it in a window in your current desktop or log into it as an alternate desktop.

You can say that the laptop was never as good or as cheap as we hoped it would be. You could say that it never got into the hands of as many children as we had hoped it would. That would be true. But you can't say it didn't work. The Constructionist method works. If I had a kid I'd want him to be educated that way.

Consider this: In 1969 intelligent people thought we might have a sizable moon base and a donut shaped space station with a Hilton and a Howard Johnson's by 2001. That year came and went and we still have neither of those things. We barely have Howard Johnson's restaurants on Earth these days. But no reasonable person would say that the Apollo program was a failure. A disappointment maybe, but not a failure. And manned space exploration on the scale shown in 2001 will happen. Not as soon as we would like, but it will happen.

You can say the same thing about using computers to educate our children. It's going to happen. There are bad ways to do this. OLPC showed us a good way to do it. It is still showing us that.

More than just Scratch, why not the full Sugar experience? You can put it in a usb stick or put it as an alternate desktop manager if you already use linux. Here in Uruguay (where the language is spanish) is what school kids get with the project Ceibal, and that includes, already localized, Logo (TurtleArt) and Scratch.

And don't focus on programming, at least at the start. Trying to do animations in drawings will be enough motivation for them to understand the basics of programming while they have fun.

(replying to my own post)
Check out the "Measure" activity: it doesn't get much geekier than this!
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Measure.

This is a charity which is definitely geeky: Sugar Labs http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page

It is a software project, a spin-off of the "One Laptop per Child" XO computer project, but they develop not just for the special-purpose green XO laptops but also Asus EEE, Intel Classmate, and your PC: USB memory stick ("Sugar on a Stick"). I think it's basically a Linux distro derived from Fedora, with oodles of child friendly software: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities

IANATeacher, but they seem to focus especially on what is pedagogically OK for the kids, helping them to teach each other.

This is a charity which is definitely geeky: Sugar Labs http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page

It is a software project, a spin-off of the "One Laptop per Child" XO computer project, but they develop not just for the special-purpose green XO laptops but also Asus EEE, Intel Classmate, and your PC: USB memory stick ("Sugar on a Stick"). I think it's basically a Linux distro derived from Fedora, with oodles of child friendly software: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities

IANATeacher, but they seem to focus especially on what is pedagogically OK for the kids, helping them to teach each other.

People from OLPC may disagree with you, and at least the experience in my country, 5 years after it got implemented, seem to be positive.

But maybe would consider putting Sugar (i.e. from here) as environment instead of a "normal" desktop and/or distribution

I wrote an Activity for the One Laptop Per Child project that does this:

http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035

I don't claim to be the first one to do this. Who would? It is such an obvious idea that you would think it could not be patented.

LaTeX is excellent for journal and technical book publishing and some other applications, but it was not designed for collaboration over the Web, and for full multiformat output.

BookType, and its predecessor Booki, are designed for collaborative authorship around the world and for multi-format output, including HTML, PDF, print-on-demand, and others. The original development was sponsored by FLOSS Manuals, http://www.flossmanuals.net/ which creates manuals for Free Software applications. I have worked on manuals with them for How to Bypass Internet Censorship (now available in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and more), Firefox, the Linux command line, mifos microfinance software, and more, and they have dozens of other titles. FLOSS Manuals also pioneered the Book Sprint, collaborative writing of manuals by 8 or 10 people (writers, subject-matter experts, editors, artists, tech admins) gathered in a room, and several others (particularly proofreaders) over the Web within a week. We did the Censorship book from Monday morning to Friday evening in a rented house in upstate New York, ordered copies from Lulu.com, and then went out for dinner. Pics available, such as https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102331710307773485600/albums/5634256041091466881/5634256041835752050

Since then I have become Program Manager for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs, the Free Software and OER partner of One Laptop Per Child. The rationale for the program is that netbook and tablet computers such as the XO-3 cost much less than printed textbooks, and have many other advantages in any school system, but especially for poor children in developing countries. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_textbooks, http://booki.treehouse.su./ Our mission is to end poverty and the various other ills associated with it. This includes unnecessary disease, disability and death; oppression of the poor and minorities around the world; much of government corruption; and wars of oppression or plunder. Naturally, more is required than computers to accomplish all of this, but it cannot be done without giving every child unfettered access to information and to other people around the world. See, for example, http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/02/15/sharing-in-gaza/

Sugar Labs plans to host book replacements in every traditional school subject, and whatever else our students need, at every level of development in every language needed. I am currently working on an Algebra text where every math statement can be copied from the document and pasted into a software session to execute and if desired plot or graph. There are more than 100,000 other OER packages available at various other Web sites that we have listed. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources

LaTeX is excellent for journal and technical book publishing and some other applications, but it was not designed for collaboration over the Web, and for full multiformat output.

BookType, and its predecessor Booki, are designed for collaborative authorship around the world and for multi-format output, including HTML, PDF, print-on-demand, and others. The original development was sponsored by FLOSS Manuals, http://www.flossmanuals.net/ which creates manuals for Free Software applications. I have worked on manuals with them for How to Bypass Internet Censorship (now available in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and more), Firefox, the Linux command line, mifos microfinance software, and more, and they have dozens of other titles. FLOSS Manuals also pioneered the Book Sprint, collaborative writing of manuals by 8 or 10 people (writers, subject-matter experts, editors, artists, tech admins) gathered in a room, and several others (particularly proofreaders) over the Web within a week. We did the Censorship book from Monday morning to Friday evening in a rented house in upstate New York, ordered copies from Lulu.com, and then went out for dinner. Pics available, such as https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102331710307773485600/albums/5634256041091466881/5634256041835752050

Since then I have become Program Manager for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs, the Free Software and OER partner of One Laptop Per Child. The rationale for the program is that netbook and tablet computers such as the XO-3 cost much less than printed textbooks, and have many other advantages in any school system, but especially for poor children in developing countries. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_textbooks, http://booki.treehouse.su./ Our mission is to end poverty and the various other ills associated with it. This includes unnecessary disease, disability and death; oppression of the poor and minorities around the world; much of government corruption; and wars of oppression or plunder. Naturally, more is required than computers to accomplish all of this, but it cannot be done without giving every child unfettered access to information and to other people around the world. See, for example, http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/02/15/sharing-in-gaza/

Sugar Labs plans to host book replacements in every traditional school subject, and whatever else our students need, at every level of development in every language needed. I am currently working on an Algebra text where every math statement can be copied from the document and pasted into a software session to execute and if desired plot or graph. There are more than 100,000 other OER packages available at various other Web sites that we have listed. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources

Plugins exist for Sugar and Lego is rewriting code for the platform.

Build the hardware and sell it at cost or maybe less then create an app store to make more money.

Huh? So, only the "rich" poor people can afford the "cool" apps?

Besides, it already has a free "app store" (AKA activity repository).

openSUSE has packaged about 50 activities in total for Sugar, with more activities available for installation from the sugarlabs.org activities repository. Activities that haven't been packaged can be downloaded directly from http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ and installed by the user through the browse interface (the repository is similar to firefox addons.)

A computer so you can use what software or access what network?

I dunno, maybe this computer using this software and accessing this network seems a good start.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick

My daughters are not quite at the age to use this yet, but I fully intend on using/trying it out with them. If all else fails just any debian based distro with the basics should do.

The environment proven effect as a Platform for children's own directed learning.

Two the most effective ways to install and use at the moment include:
A USB boot image: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
or Installing it as one of the Desktops as part of a Fedora Installation, Available During package Selection.

Sugar Labs is the OS loaded on the OLPC laptops. It's made for children and one page of its website says that the programs loaded are accessible to children as young as four years old. While I've only given it a cursory glance in a VM myself, it comes as a complete digital learning environment with programming games, text editor, web browser, and an integrated journal system where the young user can record what he or she learns after using each program. I heard Walter Bender describe the project a couple of months ago and apparently the OS opens the FOSS code behind all of the software to the user as well, for learning and tinkering. It's probably most enriching if the child has an adult around who can help them develop good habits, protect them from disturbing content, and reflect on what their figuring out.

Perhaps built-in solar makes more sense, in more places, than the hand-cranked power

Perhaps it does, perhaps it does! If, that is, you can build the device such that it can run off of built-in solar. That's the real trick, isn't it.

A simple four-function calculator trivially can run of a little photocell, and this has been true for decades. So why didn't OLPC simply put a little photocell on the XO-1? Because a little cheap photocell doesn't produce anywhere near the needed power needed by an XO-1.

And, the hand-cranked power is a particularly irritating straw man. A long, long, time ago, when OLPC was just an idea, they thought about a hand crank, and even made a mockup of what it might look like. But it was never made. Reasons: 0) some kids live in places with a decent electrical grid, so there is no need to add the cost of a generator to every single laptop; 1) an external generator can be trivially replaced if it breaks, without the laptop itself needing to be repaired; 2) a crank built-in to the laptop adds mechanical cranking strain on the laptop, necessitating the laptop being made sturdy in otherwise-needless ways; and 3) little kids are not known for their arm strength, so a generator that could be operated by leg muscles was deemed better. OLPC announced that a pull-cord generator would be the human powered generator, but as far as I can tell from a few quick Google searches just now, the pull-cord generator is still vapor.

I recently sent my XO-1 to India for use by the Bharti Integrated Rural Development Society
(B.I.R.D.S.) and I looked into a solar array for it. I found one for about $200 that should operate an XO-1 continuously and charge the battery in about an hour. I also found lots of other solar arrays that cost way more than that. So, the most affordable solar array I found cost more than the XO-1. As I understand it, the B.I.R.D.S. school has electrical power only when they run their generator, which is a few hours a day, so my hope is that the XO-1 will be useful just with the generator power. (Conveniently, the power supply on an XO-1 accepts any AC from 100 to 240 Volts, at 50 or 60 Hz, so they should be able to just plug it in with a plug adapter.)

Note that TFA says "...the I-slate is the first of a series of electronic notepads being built around a new class of low-energy-consumption microchips under development...". So, one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 isn't powered with a little solar array is that it was developed half a decade ago, and the new ultra-low-power chips are, well, new.

Isn't it enough to say "This is a cool new technology and I'm excited about it" rather than talking about how much better it is compared to a half-decade-old technology?

P.S. I put an 8 GB flash card in the SD card slot on the XO-1. On the card I put a copy of Wikipedia for Schools, which takes up about 4 GB; then I put some health and medical books and a bunch of classic fiction books (for students to read when studying English). I updated the OS on the OLPC to the latest build, and installed a typing tutor program (Typing Turtle) from Sugar Labs. I found a public-domain copy of The Elements of Style and a few other free textbooks. Finally, I put a few books on Python Programming. I haven't had any email back from B.I.R.D.S. telling me anything, so I have no idea how it's working out.

I have to say, an XO-1 loading books straight off an SD card is a pretty nice book reading platform! And with the backlight off, to read books in monochrome, battery life should be pretty good. I'm hoping they will find the XO-1 to be useful.

steveha

Laboratory equipment such as distance measured by Sonar, or any periodic electrical signal by oscilloscope.. uhuh, no way could computers be useful for that.

A computer in a laboratory is quite useful; a computer for each pupil is not (for educational purpose).

Laboratory equipment such as distance measured by Sonar, or any periodic electrical signal by oscilloscope.. uhuh, no way could computers be useful for that.

Hear, hear :-)

Hopefully this website is more to you liking then: a spin-off (long story) of the OLPC project: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=page&page=teachers .

The common Mandelbrot set is really a 2-dimensional slice of a 4-dimensional object identified by both the combination of the complex numbers Z0 and C in the canonical Zn+1 = Zn^2 + C. The mandelbrot set lives in the plane where Z0 = 0 + 0i, while the Julia sets live on infinitely-many-squared orthogonal planes in the remaining two dimensions, each one intersecting Mandelbrot's plane in a single point of complex coordinates C.

Visualizing this hyperspace monster was made easy by POV-Ray. It took my computer two week of computation to render 80 seconds of animated 3D slices of a the quaternion. Check out the scene source.

/me looks forward for a real-time Julia4D explorer.

The common Mandelbrot set is really a 2-dimensional slice of a 4-dimensional object identified by both the combination of the complex numbers Z0 and C in the canonical Zn+1 = Zn^2 + C. The mandelbrot set lives in the plane where Z0 = 0 + 0i, while the Julia sets live on infinitely-many-squared orthogonal planes in the remaining two dimensions, each one intersecting Mandelbrot's plane in a single point of complex coordinates C.

Visualizing this hyperspace monster was made easy by POV-Ray. It took my computer two week of computation to render 80 seconds of animated 3D slices of a the quaternion. Check out the scene source.

/me looks forward for a real-time Julia4D explorer.

"DIY" and software do not appear together often enough.

I would teach them how to create their own personal "apps" using Squeak. Use Nebraska to collaborate and share in class. Look for a few techies to help.

To get stared, try Sugar on a Stick and look at Etoys, a specialized subset of Squeak. (You use Squeak to create Etoys.)

http://www.squeak.org/

http://squeakland.org/

http://www.sugarlabs.org/

Nebraska: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356

Wider range of info: http://squeak.zwiki.org/SqueakNotes

A recent class at University of Illinois: https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs598rej/Spring+2009;jsessionid=3BA508D972A809064DC117DBDF7C36C8

They could have just invested in Canonical and Ubuntu, rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

Why Canonical and not any other Linux company, I mean (K/X/Ed)Ubuntu is great, (most of my computers run Kubuntu or Xubuntu), but Google has a particular objective: directing as many as possible users to Google products, this is clearly not the goal of Canonical.

And besides, diversity is good, the goal is not to supersede one monoculture with another - Ok, Google is not the first address as far as diversity is concerned, but still.

Another window manager just dilutes the current pool of people trying to do KDE and Gnome.

It's not that the two are the only players in the FLOSS field, and probably they are not even the best for the specific requirements of netbooks. Fluxbox, Enlightment, or even something like Sugar are much more lightweight and might be better for the functions required. Or even Google has something new and exciting to offer. Anyways, I even doubt that the KDE and Gnome guys actually wouldn't appreciate other ideas being tested.

None of of my old computers that were from the Win 95/98/2000 era have the option to boot from USB. Is there going to be other media available?

Also LiveCDs, among other options. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Emulator_image_files#Live_CDs

Going by the pictures I would keep this away from children:

http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=page&page=learners

Arrrgh. I need to dim the lights, put on some Pink Floyd and look at that comic strip again.

OK, but don't go in the water.

You can boot from a CD as well as a stick, if your system can't boot a USB device.

Go to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry and look at "Boot it", where it says: "If your machine doesn't support that (booting from USB), download and burn: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso". It's a small 8MB bootloader that easily fits on a CD.

You can boot from a CD as well as a stick, if your system can't boot a USB device.

Go to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry and look at "Boot it", where it says: "If your machine doesn't support that (booting from USB), download and burn: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso". It's a small 8MB bootloader that easily fits on a CD.

From the demo video, I've got to wonder what the they were thinking. This doesn't seem like a kid-friendly UI.

http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=gallery&page=media_01

The intial interface showing what I assume is the "neighborhood" view of other Sugar users/machines (arranged in cum-by-ya campfire circles) is cute, but seems more designed for a Movie than for actual use (cf Jurassic Park's "Oh, it's Unix! I know that!" interface where they zoom down from a building view to an individual computer).

One you get past this odd and confusing initial user interface it seems you're using traditional apps like the Editor/Word Processor they show.

Maybe there are other elements of Sugar that are better designed or more innovative, but the demo doesn't seem too compelling.

Most of those Older Pc's cant boot from a USB stick. It's only been the past 3 years that booting from a usb drive has become the norm, before that it was an oddity.

There is a boot helper CD for older computers like this. The beauty is that the OS on the computer is untouched, since Sugar runs from memory not the hard drive. Additionally, all progress is saved to the USB drive, so the stick is portable from computer to computer.

They have a solutions for that: "If you have an older machine or you just want things to immediately work without fussing with the BIOS, you can burn a "Boot Helper" CD using the .iso below. This will start the boot from the CD, then read files from the USB stick: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso"

It's an .iso image written to a USB stick with Fedora LiveUSB Creator. Linky link

You can just burn the iso to a DVD, if you prefer, but it is a 1GB image so CD is out of the question.

Going by the pictures I would keep this away from children: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=page&page=learners

Arrrgh. I need to dim the lights, put on some Pink Floyd and look at that comic strip again.

Going by the pictures I would keep this away from children:
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=page&page=learners

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick

Perhaps you would like some Sugar, the original Desktop for the OLPC XO before Negroponte sold out to MS. They shifted from the file/folder model to a model based on activities recorded in a journal. Many grups complained because it didn't conform to their conception of a general purpose operating system, but then the designers of Sugar never intended for it to be a general pupose OS.

It's true that the AMD Geode processor in the XO is underpowered. It's almost as slow as a Cray-1. But that's partly the point. It runs on only half a watt. The XO _maxes_ at about 8 W, an essential design point for villages where they take car batteries in a donkey cart to get them recharged somewhere else in order to keep their mobile phones running.

I agree about selling to the First World, which we are in fact doing. There are 15,000 units in Birmingham, Alabama, and trials in New York. Likely-soon-to-be-Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois is a strong supporter of giving every child in Illinois a laptop and a real education. (Blago is due to be impeached next week, with a trial in the IL Senate to follow.)

It's still about education. We're getting moving now on post-Gutenberg digital textbooks. Not PDFs of dead tree books, that is, but interactive learning systems based on Smalltalk, or incorporating the digital oscilloscope function of the XO, and much more.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

It's also about social transformation. Google

OLPC ethiopia-implementation-report

or

OLPC Astounded-in-Arahuay

to get both the reports and the discussion about them.

As for XP on the XO: I am greatly looking forward to the spectacle of Microsoft shooting itself in all of its shareholders' feet by sponsoring trials of dual-boot XOs. We are going to see tests of Fedora Rawhide Linux and Sugar vs. XP and a lame set of so-called educational software on the same hardware by the same people, hardly any of them on the Microsoft payroll. I have not been able to think of a suitable Onion headline that could make this seem worse for M$ than it already is.

Shiny new boxes won't fix the problem, but putting useful software on the machines would help. For example, Sugar has lot of useful software that will challenge kids intellectually. The Sugar community is working on bootable Live USB images with persistent data storage, so that you can keep your OS and data on a flash drive, and run it on whatever computer is available to you (at school or home).

Changing teacher's attitudes would also help. Many teachers are intimidated by technology, but I think they are more intimidated that their students know more than they do about it. Learning technology requires some humility on the part of teachers.

Why are you referring to OLPC in the past tense? The organization hasn't lived up to it's goals, but they have shipped around half a million laptops to kids around the world. The Linux-based Sugar software continues to improve and there are many volunteers contributing to the project. The organization got a lot flak when Negroponte announced the Windows XP port, but many volunteers and employees put their bad feelings aside and continue to work on the project. Now Sugar Labs (the software spinoff) is branching out in order to incorporate their software in other Linux distributions. There are also several ports underway to put Sugar on other laptops and embedded devices.

And it wasn't designed in some out of touch lab. It was designed for harsh environments, limited internet connectivity, intermittent electrical power, bright sunlight readability, and children with no previous knowledge of computers. I think the XO-1 is a remarkable piece of hardware.

Surprisingly, nobody posted the URL yet: http://www.sugarlabs.org/ .

That's essentially what Negroponte has boiled the project down to by letting Sugar dev's out of the loop. Many, Walter Bender included, have gone to start Sugar Labs to ensure that Sugar remains available regardless of what OLPC does.

It destroys the "It's an education project, not a laptop project." to not ship with an operating system and educational software.