Beginning school children learn to use their OLPC Quanta XO subnotebook laptops

1st and 2nd std. children learn to use their OLPC Quanta XO subnotebook laptops.
Location: New Schoolhouse, Village: Khairat(खैराट) GPS:18.919687N, 73.300162E

The bespectacled gentleman in the blue-grey striped kurta is Prof. Nagarjuna, Homi-Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR. The other gentleman (in the white shirt and brown pants) is the children's teacher: Mr. Sandeep Surve.
The children in the row of benches on the right are 1st std. children.
And in the row of benches on the left are 2nd std. children.

They learned to take digital photos and annotate them in the Devnaagri (देवनागरी) Marathi (मराठी) script.

The OLPC Quanta XO is an inexpensive subnotebook meant for kids to learn, explore, experiment and express themselves. (constructionist-style of learning). Hardware includes a video camera, microphone, long-range 802.11 Wi-Fi mobile ad-hoc mesh networking, and touch pad. Uses flash memory instead of a hard drive.

Very solid construction of the laptop -- withstands a 3 foot drop to a stone floor.
The membrane keyboard is spill proof.
The design has no motor-driven moving parts -- no hard disk drive, no CD/DVD media, no floppy drives and no fans. It is passively cooled.
It has an SD slot as well as USB ports.

The OLPC Quanta XO runs a slimmed-down Fedora Linux and Sugar -- an open source GUI designed to help young children collaborate. Sugar is written in Python.

Does not use the desktop, folder and window metaphors, familiar in Windows, Mac and Ubuntu Linux.
Default full-screen activities make the kids focus on only one program at a time. Apps for Sugar are called "activities". Sugar implements a novel file-handling metaphor (the journal). It automatically saves the child's running program session. They can later use an interface to pull up their past works by date, by activity used or by file type.

Four dozen something laptops went to this village alone.
The kids carry the laptops home, so that their parents (mostly farmers and cattle herdsmen) may also observe and learn.

The school uses a PC-type UPS which can charge a dozen OLPCs at a time.
But kids are given chargers to take home, so they can charge the batteries at home also.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• OLPC
• XO
• subnotebook
• 5-year-old
• 7-year-old
• children
• village
• Maharashtra
• WiFi