Day 32: Summer Holidays

Well the time spent working on the project so far has flown by, and as previously organised I will now be taking some holiday leave until mid August, meaning I will probably be back working on the project some time after 2009.08.17.

This doesn’t mean the ball stops rolling however, and it allows me to hand the joint reigns over to Andy who will be living in Lincoln again and able continue the project research.

The last week has allowed me to start updating the project wiki which I believe will become the focus of the projects outcome.

I think that with the amount of work already completed on Sugar, including Sugar on a Stick, and with help from the Fedora Edu Spin, we will be able to push forward into being able to produce a bootable pen drive image which will allow users to install and develop sugar activities.

This is actually already possible; however some prior knowledge is needed in order to set up with the software, development files and necessary information to create activities. (Such as getting a hold of, updating and building Sugar Jhbuild, the development version of Sugar, etc.)

The best route that this UROS project could now direct its attention, at least in my opinion; would be to provide the above knowledge in the form of tutorials and wiki information for entry level access users.
By that I mean users who know nothing about OLPC or Sugar, but want to learn and subsequently create activities, or in any case just the latter part of creating activities without a platform to work from.

A best case scenario as Iv discussed with James would be to have some static format of the wiki in a final stage snapshot already on the image provided, meaning users without an internet connection could still make use of the materials provided.

Those with a connection could then access the latest version online, and contribute towards the wiki with any problems or updates they encounter.

This is Karl signing off, thanks!

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Day 27: OSS Unconference

I’d like to break away from my usual format to get straight to yesterdays events (Day 26, 2009.07.20) at the Open Source Schools Unconference, which turned out to be a complete success and a very fun day out to Nottingham!

As already mentioned by Andy yesterday, we (Andy, Cornelia, Karl Beecher and I) arrived to the conference, and as greeted, were told that of the many talks that were being done, the OLPC / Sugar / SoaS talk wasn’t going ahead as planned, as unfortunately the speaker had come down with swine flu.

We were then asked if Andy and I could step in to do the talk instead, which came as a complete surprise to both of us! With mixed feelings of anxiety and excitement at the prospect of doing an unprepared talk, we both agreed we would be happy to attempt to present what the project was all about, which at the same time would give us a chance to plug our very own Codex 2 project, and hopefully raise awareness of the OLPC project.

The day was filled with some very interesting talks on a range of different subjects concerning Open Source Software, which due to the nature of the unconference being centred around schools, often included the use of software in learning environments. This seems entirely acceptable considering the majority of participants were teachers or those involved in local education authorities in some way.

This meant that many of the ideas on display included how technology could be better implemented in a school environment, development of the curriculum, use of more open source software in schools or in general and using technologies where needed as an aid to learning. An interesting book I was referenced too was Mindstorms, written by Seymour Papert in 1980, which after a little Googling, can be located here for free (I think).

One of the most interesting Software speeches I heard was about a developing program called Scratch, and as described by the website is a;
“new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art…. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills.”

As with many of the talks done during the day, things were recorded, and people were busy Twittering away. The main conference was streamed live, and taken from the oss link, it is possible to go through the videos and twitters uploaded through out the day, for example the Scratch Presentation can be found here (starting around 1 minute into the video).

It may seem a little silly going through old twitters, but actually there are some useful links posted by participants, such as slide presentations or external links on subjects being discussed at the time.

Our very own OLPC talk, I think, went well of all things considering we had no preparation, and half way into the talk, the participant who originally was asked to do the talk stepped in, creating a kind of group at the front.
With 3 laptops and 1 XO laptop on the front desk, we managed to put out the important information with the help of Karl and Cornelia which included what the OLPC project was, what Sugar was, a live demonstration of the XO Laptop along with live demonstrations of Sugar on a Stick running from a pen drive and emulated.

I’m sure I remember a couple of videos being taken of us along with photos (which I blame for any mind blocks during my talk), which I am unable to locate at the moment, but I’m sure will surface eventually – funnily enough we were also interviewed by some local students from Hamble College who were also at the conference to cover the day. By logging in as a guest, you can see some interviews with some of the speakers from the day. My guess is that unfortunately, Andy and I didn’t make the cut to be posted on the site!

We were also able to hand out during the talk and over the course of the day, the official Codex Flyer (PDF Format) that Andy and I created last week, in an attempt to sum up all the pieces of the project puzzle into an attractive format.
The flyer itself is part of a new forked GitHub repository I have made from last years Codex project, which we will be adding too with new content such as tutorials.

I realise this is a slight monolith of a blog post, but on one last note, I have added last years Codex Wiki link, courtesy of Joss, which we will be updating over the remainder of the project with relevant information on the 2009 project.

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Day 22: Progress

Things feel like they have been moving a little more over the past week, and with Andy’s return to the project from his camp away, we should hopefully be able to produce some useful work!

Following on from where I left you, aside from our results celebrations, last week Day 18 (2009.07.08) Day 19 (2009.07.09) and Day 20 (2009.07.10) continued with getting Sugar JHbuild to work, and after some discussions with the developers, I finally found myself pulling, updating and building a version of the latest Sugar JHbuild successfully onto the laptop.

This then allowed me to correctly get the sugar emulator working from the build, meaning I should now be able to mess around with the build code for Sugar, and hopefully learn how to introduce my own activities. It is possible to do very useful things with the emulator, such as run multiple profile instances in order to test XO collaboration etc.

During the build I had found myself with more errors, which when I asked the developers, was able to be guided onto the correct course of action, along with asking me to actively contribute by raising a ticket over at Sugar Labs Development, in order to allow the developers to diagnose and fix the problem.

After further talks with Sebastian over what I can do to contribute, I soon found myself writing some basic tutorials for anyone else who might be new and come along attempting to get Sugar JH build working.
These were uploaded to the Education Spin Wiki which were made in order to allow access to the Education Spin, allowing members to build their own version.

The Education Spin Wiki can be found here, along with the Getting Started Page with some tutorials here. The idea for the tutorials is to allow anyone who might be new to Linux, OLPC or Open Source projects in general to get involved as easily as possible by stepping them through the start up processes required to for example, get Sugar JH build working.

This also prompted me to create accounts with Fedora and Sugar Labs Git in order to allow me to contribute to the Wiki and hopefully Sugar Project. Along with this I managed to finally create my own SSH Key to develop with.

Day 21 (2009.07.13) and Day 22 (2009.07.14) saw Andy return to the project, and allowed for Cornelia, Andy and I to have an informal meet on how the project is going and where we would like to head.

With the date of the Nottingham Unconference looming and its day Programme released, we also planned out what materials we would need, and so after registering that we would attended, agreed that we would be bringing a handout along with demonstration of the Codex project, in order to hype interest about OLPC and the Sugar project to other Conference attendees.
We plan to update the Codex Wiki created last year, using it as a portal for those who want to follow on from our leaflet.

Finally we also got a link to the missing puzzle pieces of last years Git Codex Sample along with Tutorial Content, meaning we can hopefully adapt some content that was created last year, carrying on the cycle. – Over and out!

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Day 17: Missing a Beat

I realise that I missed what seemed to be turning into a regular Thursday post last week, and thought I better not let Tuesday go to slip too!
I better start with tracing my steps over the last week’s events..

Day 13 (2009.07.01) consisted of further reading in the labs including a very interesting article by a magazine called “Communications of the ACM” (Thanks to Cornelia for the link) which discussed the “Vision vs. Reality” of the past present and future plans of the OLPC project, an issue copy of which should be available here for free (VOL.52 NO.6). There are also a number of other interesting open source community and general technology discussions that are inside too!

After the general realisation that I didn’t know enough about Linux, I also went onto look for some guides on the Linux world, and came across a useful array of 10 Free Linux Ebooks for Beginners which I have been trying to work through a little.

Day 14 (2009.07.02) found me working from home as I have been since, as there didn’t seem to be any major need to work in the labs when at the moment most of my time is being taken up by reading.
This did allow me to try out the Sugar Jhbuild again (as the lab access was restricting), however after a successful download, further problems cropped up in trying to build, and unfortunately I am still no further. Ill return to this when I am able to work with a little more confidence on the terminal.

This days main point of interest was an IRC meeting that I was invited to join at 7pm which wanted some support for a proposal of a project in London (among other pilot studys), where XO laptops were being requested for what looks like the biggest UK pilot study done so far. The main project can be found here, along with its proposal over here.
It was interesting watching a live meeting of real projects being discussed and passed for support with available XO laptops and showed there is defiantly some activity going on!

Day 15 (2009.07.03), Day 16 (2009.07.06) and Today have been spent reading into Python and Linux, finishing a Byte of Python, which I would recommend to any beginner python programmer, or if your just starting out at all! (See previous posts for links)
It was interesting to learn that Python was actually based on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and not of the snake!

The next step up from this is a more hefty book “Begginning Python – From Novice to Professional” by Magnus Lie Hetland (Thanks to Cornelia) and I have already started having fun trying to craft my own applications, such as recreating simple command line games that I have worked on in the past for previous programming languages such as C# & Java, I might even post a few polished scripts up for those of you reading to try! – Though ill warn you they aren’t anything special.

I would however, like to try and see if I cant make myself a simple space invaders type game, and then see how easy it is to import into Sugar using the abundant information there is on creating Sugar Activities, and moving from Python to Sugar found at Sugar Labs.
Indecently, I’v come across the “Activity Handbook” wiki which’s purpose is to “provide you with all the information you need in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO.” – So this will be added onto the pile of reading to get stuck into!

On the Linux side of things, a useful tutorial website I am working through at the moment is “Learning the Shell”, which is allowing me to get a better concept on how the BASH shell works inside out! Id also like to include a note here in case anyone missed it in the comment, a link to a very interesting paper on Teaching and Learning Open Source Development (thanks to Joss) headed “A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Community Open Source, Chris Tyler”, which I think would be useful for any student involved in a project like this where we are interacting with the community

Andy recently checked up to see how things are going, and its funny to hear they are putting him through his paces, he will be back with us next week, which has let me decide to continue working more on the Python and Linux knowledge bases until he returns, meaning we will be able to attack the Sugar side of things better prepared.

Right now however, I have just received my results for the year and they have turned out very positive, meaning some celebrations are in order I think!

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