Kids are delighted to have the XOs – personalised with their names stuck on them.

The second Sugar-OLPC project in Goa went live today – Feb 5th, 2013 – at Nirmala Kindergarten. The first one at Merces has been running for close to 3 years now. For Nirmala KG, the planning had started a few months ago in August of 2012 (see previous post ‘Second Sugar-OLPC Project in Goa‘). We had visited the school to explore the possibility of doing an OLPC project there. Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE) is our partner for the Sugar-OLPC work that we do here in Goa, as well as the parent institute in whose premises the school is located.

After the initial discussions, we had conducted a Sugar Training Workshop at NIE in November 2012 for the teachers of Nirmala-KG (see post ‘Sugar Training for Nirmala-KG Teachers‘), and decided to start the OLPC project in early 2013. In our later discussions with the school, we also decided that to begin with, we would only start with the older kids (senior KG – ages 4 and a half to 5 and a half), and see how it goes before going ahead with the smaller age groups and the children with special needs.

Kids have fun taking photos with the Record activity

The school was busy with the admissions for the new year and other matters, so we had finalised on Feb 5th as the ‘Go-Live’ date. Before that, I had the task of upgrading Sugar on all the 33 XOs in the school and setting up the School Server. After Sameer Verma’s India visit in Jan this year, I had learnt everything I needed to know from him about School Server installation, and this helped a lot (see the post ‘XS Learning with Sameer Verma‘). I upgraded the XOs to the latest build of Sugar available at that time ( 12.1.0 for XO-1 – Build 21) and installed School Server Ver. 0.7 – this still resides as a VM on my laptop, till the school buys their own. It took 4 or 5 trips to the school to set all this up, but it was necessary to get all this stuff right this time, so the project could be managed and administered better. The only problem that remains is that of the RTC batteries – in most of the XOs, this has completely died, and though the XOs work fine, they all start with the ‘Invalid System Date message and entries in the journal get written with the wrong date and time. We have to find replacement batteries for these XOs, but till then, we’ll just have to live with the problem. It doesn’t hamper using the activities though, which is good.

Teacher Poonam helps one of the children.

Sr. Olga, principal of Nirmala KG, was extremely supportive and went out of her way to make sure that I got everything I needed. More importantly, she made sure that every task that was expected of the school was completed, that too well in time. No last minute rush to fix things. By the 4th of February, a day before ‘Go Live’, we had all XOs with the latest Sugar on them, with their Favourites view on the Home screen suitably customised, and each XO with a sticker of the child’s name stuck on it. Neat.

On the 5th Feb, the day the project was to start, the school was without electricity for much of the morning. The teachers were worried, but it didn’t really matter since Sr. Olga had made sure that the laptops were fully charged. It only meant that I wouldn’t be able to start the School Server and the router, which was fine.

And so the project took off to a fine start on 5th Feb 2013, with the kids clicking away photos on their XOs! More details about the classroom sessions in the next post.

At Khairat near Mumbai, Sameer demonsrates the School Server installation to Rafikh and Sandeep Surve as kids look on.

In January 2013, Sameer Verma from SFSU, during a trip to India, visited Goa – a detour that happened mostly because of Harriet Vidyasagar’s efforts to keep all the working OLPC projects in India visible to the outside world, while simultaneously ensuring that we got the best minds to get a firsthand look at the projects here and to provide us inputs that would enable us to run these projects better. The previous such visit was by Walter Bender himself; this time it was Sameer from San Francisco. I’d been in touch with him over the email requesting very specific help about the School Server setup and administration, and that’s exactly what he and I focused on while he was here in Goa. Of course we had to make time between his various other engagements, but that wasn’t such a problem – it only meant that Sameer’s day didn’t end comfortably after dinner.

In the Goa OLPC program at the Merces school, we’d had an aborted attempt at implementing the OLPC School Server once in the past – it was the earlier version of XS and things hadn’t worked out too well; before you could say ‘XS’, the school server work had been abandoned. But with the new XS Server 0.7, things are a lot easier, and even if Sameer with his vast experience makes the installation look like child’s play, I have to admit that the installation and administration is indeed a whole lot easier, and can actually be done without scratching your head even once. But that’s not all. The new server is administered though a Moodle client, and that opens up a lot of other possibilities. Besides managing journal backups and hosting Sugar activities and other relevant content, which is what we had wanted to do with the server to begin with, the ability to add your own Moodle courses to the School Server is a big asset. In the future, we could consider adding courses in Moodle that are specially designed for children that would supplement the learning that they engage in with their Sugar activities. Where necessary, teachers could organise the content (videos, storybooks etc.) that they would like the children to see, in the form of a ‘course’ that would be uploaded on the server, which the kids could access from their XOs. This needs a lot of thought and design work of course.

So, sitting with Sameer to learn all about the XS was the main agenda for me, and I must say these sessions were very fruitful. Later, all of us – Harriet, Gayathri and the kids included – went along with Sameer to Mumbai and visited the Khairat project nearby, which is being managed by the Home Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE). Rafikh from HBCSE took us to Khairat; we set up the School Server there as well, and backed up all the XOs there. Sameer, as part of his research, has been analysing data coming out of the XOs at various OLPC projects, and we shared our data from the Merces project at Goa and the one at Khairat with him.

The dhaba (roadside eatery) at Khairat where we had lunch.

Teachers from Nirmala KG try out Sugar Activities.

The Sugar Training Workshop for the teachers at Nirmala Kindergarten was held between 5th and 8th November 2013, two and a half hours each day for the four days. Besides giving an overview of Sugar, the training also focused on some specific activities that cater to children of the age group that we were dealing with (ages 2 and a half to 5 and a half). There were the usual suspects – Record, Speak, Memorize, Jigsaw Puzzle, Turtle Blocks, but also a few new entrants – Letters, Reflection, Nutrition, Tam Tam, I Know India and a new activity that I had developed called Tile Match, which is nothing but a version of Memorize but with all the tiles face-up (not hidden) – better for small kids for whom even making the combination is a mystery, leave alone remembering the position of the tiles. There were eight teachers in the training, which included Sr. Olga, the principal of Nirmala KG. We also spent some time discussing what activities we could use with the special kids from the Resource Room, and the teachers came up with a few ideas – one that matches an existing GCompris activity called Clockgame – in this you have to move the hands of the clock to match a given time that is randomly generated – and another which would let the kids paint or draw within a fixed area (such as colouring within the contours of a letter). The GCompris activities don’t seem to work on the new version of Sugar on the XO (I had installed 12.1.0 for XO-1 – Build 21) but amazingly, worked on my Sweets Distribution on Ubuntu 12.10 (amazing because it has always been the other way round so far), so I was able to show the activity them. It has a few glitches and (like all GCompris activities) would be better with a more Sugar-like interface and graphics, but they were pleased to see it. I’ve started maintaining a wish list on my Talk page for activities which I think it would help to have on our projects here, esp in the India context.

The letters activity can be enjoyed by all age groups.

The training went well and the teachers participated wholeheartedly by taking pictures, making audio recordings and their own games in Memorize. But we had the same problem with playing Memorize in collaborative mode as I had had in two previous training sessions – the names of the collaborating players (their XO names) that appear on the left panel in Memorize don’t match the actual XOs. For example, my name is Salil and while playing the game, it may appear that it is my turn to play since my name would be highlighted. Others should not be able to click on any of the tiles since it is not their turn. However, what actually happens is that my clicking gets disabled and somebody else, who is not Salil, gets a turn to play (I cannot click, but he/she can, and who can is found out only by each player clicking and checking). This causes a lot of confusion and there’s no alternative but to abandon the game. Very frustrating, and I’m not even sure how to replicate the situation since it seems to happen randomly. But once I get some time, I’ll see if I can replicate it and predict when it happens, and then log a bug report.

Teachers Darshana (from KG) and Sanjini and Karen (from the Special Kids Resource Room) during the training.

During the training, we decided to start the OLPC project at the school after the Christmas season, in early 2013. Meanwhile, the school would work on setting up the stage for the project – deciding where to keep the 30-odd XOs, their charging routine, as well as a timetable for the use of the XOs in class. At this stage we were not talking about letting the children take the XOs home.

Salil shows the Sugar interface to teacher Darshana.

Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE), our primary partners in the OLPC project here in Goa, have around 18 XO-1s with them, which were initially kept there with the idea of using them for centralised Teacher Training workshops for Sugar for the Goa OLPC projects. But, since we have only the Merces school project on the OLPC map in Goa, we would end up doing all the training in the school’s premises, using the XOs that are with the school. This meant that the XOs at Nirmala could be used for other projects – perhaps another school in Goa. We started thinking about this and Dr. Rita Paes, principal of NIE, suggesting using them in their own Kindergarten School, which is housed within the same premises as NIE. Logistically and economically, this would be very convenient, especially given the fact that funding for the OLPC work in Goa has stopped and we don’t have the luxury of travelling to remote areas to implement projects. So we decided to take up the offer and start planning for a project at this school.

The toddlers in teacher Betty’s class watch themselves on the XO.

Nirmala Kindergarten is, as the name suggests, a pre-primary school. Kids at this school range from ages 2 and a half to 5 and a half. They have a toddler’s section, a junior and senior kindergarten section, and also a Resource Room for children with special needs. When we visited the school in August last year (2012) for the first time, we went to each class with an XO and interacted with the kids there – they were all excited to see the XO and we took a lot of pictures with them. And just to show them how child friendly and tough the XO is, I even dropped the XO a couple of times (this was after my new found confidence after watching Walter Bender drop it so effortlessly at all his demos here in Goa).

Sr. Olga, principal of Nirmala Kindergarten, in her office

Then the discussions with the school started, mostly with the principal Sr. Olga and Dr, Rita Paes of NIE. We were going to use the laptops that were already with NIE but needed to add a few more so that each child would have her own XO, and the teachers would have their own as well. For this, we pulled out a few of the extra XOs from the Merces school (kept there as a backup in case their XOs failed, but never really used, thanks to the ruggedness of the XO). We fixed early November as the time to have the the Sugar training for the teachers at Nirmala KG, and decided to discuss when to start the project at the school during the course of the training.

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These sessions were unique since this was the first time that we were interacting with the children directly in their XO class, and not in an afterschool camp or workshop. Generally, the teachers handle the XO classes by themselves, but this year we decided that for new activities, we would not just train the teachers, but also conduct a session in the XO class itself, which the teachers could observe and get involved in. Later, the same activity would be continued by the teachers on their own in the XO classes that would follow.

Turtle Art in progress.

For these sessions, we had decided to work only on the square, and just touch upon the rectangle at the end. This was to allow children enough time to get used to the Turtle interface – how to drag and drop the blocks, how to change values, how to get rid of unwanted blocks littering the canvas etc. It didn’t take much time for the children to get the hang of it; the only troublesome obstacle being the touchpad on some of the XOs. The XO-1′s touchpad can get very difficult to use sometimes, and making the cursor move to a desired location can become like a project in itself. I am told that this problem was resolved to some extent on the later XOs (XO 1.5 and 1.75), but given that all our laptops are XO-1s, there was nothing we could do but clean the touch pad frequently and exchange the difficult XOs for other pieces, which were kept on standby. I wish we had mice for all the XOs, the way HBCSE has done for Khairat (though the XOs there are fewer in number).

It was nice the see the children get so involved in creating shapes with the turtle. As always, some of the students caught on to it sooner that the others, and went on to make the rectangle as well. It was also very heartening to see the teachers so eager and ready to help us in conducting the sessions -  helping children understand the turtle interface, and explaining the geometry to them. We hope they continue to use Turtle Art in their XO classes this year, and let the students experiment with drawing different shapes and exploring geometry with one of the best tools available for this.

Photographs courtesy Bindi Dharia.

Harriet Vidyasagar (left) and Bindi Dharia (right) with the new principal of the school Loretta Colaco.

On Saturday July 7th, 2012, we conducted a Teachers’ Update Training session at Our Lady of Merces High School, Merces, Goa for the primary school teachers who have been involved with the OLPC project at the school. Besides Harriet Vidyasagar who has been with the Merces OLPC project since its inception, Bindi Dharia, an intern with OLPC USA, was also present for the training, which was conducted by Salil and Gayathri.

It had been almost one and a half years since the last Teacher Training at Merces, and with so many new Sugar activities having come up since then, it was essential that we have this training before the new academic year began in full swing. We also needed to stress the importance of using Turtle Art in the XO classes. Turtle Art had been part of the previous training, but hadn’t been incorporated into the XO classes last year. After the Geometry Camp that we conducted in April this year, we were convinced that Turtle Art was an invaluable tool to use while teaching basic geometry to the children. It was therefore decided to start the training with a refresher session on Turtle Art, focusing on simple geometric shapes – the square, the rectangle and the rhombus – how to draw a square in Turtle Art, and then tweak the parameters to turn it into a rectangle and then a rhombus. The teachers responded well with hands-on participation on their XOs; some of them who finished early even went on to draw the more difficult triangle.

Teachers explore the new activity ‘I Know India’.

Following the Turtle Art session, we went on to explore the new Sugar activity ‘I Know India’. I noticed that between the time I had had my first look at this activity and the training, the activity already sported some new features. ‘I Know India’ allows you to explore the states and cities of India, and when run in the Play more, allows you to test yourself with a quiz about Indian states, state capitals and other cities of India. It is a very nice activity that can be used to introduce people to the geography of the country, and I am sure children of Class 3 and 4 will take to it very well, since they already study about Indian states in their Geography class. The activity does require a few improvements, especially with the English in the text that comes up, but this was easily taken care of. I sent out an email to the author of the activity Alan Aguiar, bringing this to his notice and offering to correct the comments, and by the next evening, I already had a reply from him instructing which files I could modify to correct the English. I could do this only after the training was over, but even so, it was heartening to know that support was readily available and that it was so simple to fix the problem.  The activity does refer to Union Territories as States, but I am sure that will also get corrected in newer versions. Harriet suggested that the teachers give their inputs about how the activity could be improved or enhanced further, and a few ideas came up – having a section on famous monuments of India and their locations – ‘Where is the Taj Mahal?’ or ‘Where is the Sun Temple?’

The latter part of the training was spent in introducing the teachers to some of the new game-like activities that are available within Sugar, starting with the word-based activities ‘Letters’ and ‘Across and Down’.  ‘Letters’ requires you to create words from a jumbled set of letters (the longer the word, the more points you get) while ‘Across and Down’ is based on the popular word game Scrabble, and is played similarly. Besides these, we also introduced the teachers to ‘Numbers’, which is an activity that has been around for some time, but hasn’t really been used in the XO Classes in the school. I recalled that during the Digital Stories workshop last year, the children did use this activity quite a lot and enjoyed competing with each other to see who would get to a score of 100 first, so we decided to demonstrate the activity to the teachers, with the idea of getting them to use it in the XO classes this year.

We managed to finish the training in time, but also decided that we would try to have another update training after a couple of months to cover a few more activities that I have in mind, which I think will work well in the school. For now, the teachers have enough to work with.

And YES – they have included 2 XO classes per week for Classes 3 & 4; in fact the first XO class for Class 3 had already taken place the previous Saturday – 30th June 2012. Wonderful news indeed. We suggested having a Teachers’ Update Training and the teachers readily agreed, and in fact quite enthusiastically suggested doing it on the coming Saturday itself – 7th July 2012.  The immediate plan therefore is to do a 2-hour teachers’ training this Saturday between 11 am and 1 pm – an update to introduce the teachers to the new activities that are now available in Sugar, those that our research indicates would work well with the curriculum that the schools in Goa follow. This would be followed by us using one of the scheduled XO classes next week to conduct a session with the children using activities that haven’t been used in the regular XO classes as yet. These sessions would be for the Class 4 students – on 7th and 9th July 2012.

Khairat, nestled in the foothills of the Western Ghats..

The beginning of the monsoon and the first rains could only make the much awaited visit to Khairat village more exciting. Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer enthusiasm and energy of the teacher Sandeep Surve who almost single handedly ensures that the OLPC project at the small village school in Khairat is a continuing success story. He is supported by volunteers from HBCSE (Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai) who visit the school every week and help with new and novel ways of using Sugar activities on the XOs. On June 17th and 18th, Harriet Vidyasagar and I accompanied Prof. G. Nagarjuna and Rafikh from HBCSE on a visit to Khairat. . For Harriet of course, it was a reestablishing of ties with the people and with a project that she has been long associated with, but for me it was the first visit, and a very eventful one at that.

The first day was mostly spent interacting with the children at the school, and watching Rafikh and the children doing collaborative work on the XO, while Surve updated us on the recent happenings and progress on the project. The next day I recorded on video an interview with Surve (which I hope to post on the blog soon) and couldn’t stop being amazed by the man’s dedication to the project and his enthusiasm and drive despite all the difficulties he faces. Besides using the XOs with the students in class, he also uses the XO to create question papers for his students (using the Write activity). Then he either prints the papers by making a PDF file that he copies from the Journal onto his pen drive and takes it to the nearby village for printing, or (and this was amazing) he shares it with his students in class over the XO’s mesh network, so that each of them have a copy of the question paper in their journals. He then asks them to log out and restart their XOs, and the students then answer their individual question papers using the Write activity. The restart is required of course so that the students don’t end up writing their answers on the same shared document.

Memorize game to identify vehicles using images downloaded from the Internet. Children use the local language Marathi on the XO.

Surve also showed us a Memorize game that he’s created for the children – matching vehicles with their names. He doesn’t have any Internet access in his school so he goes to a cyber cafe in a nearby village, downloads images from the Internet onto his pen drive and then uses them to create the game in Memorize. Though there’s no wired or wireless Internet in the village, Internet access can easily be made available with mobile broadband dongles – this is one of the facilities and infrastructure that the project desperately needs but can’t have due to nobody funding the project at present. In the interview Surve spoke of a ‘wishlist’ of things that would help him immensely in the project – very basic and relatively inexpensive items like Internet access, a dedicated computer for the school, a printer for administrative work, and a projector or large monitor to share downloaded educational multimedia content with the class.

Harriet and I thought it would be really nice if we could have teachers in the OLPC project at Merces, Goa interact with Surve from Khairat so that they could learn from each others’ experiences. As for me, I decided I would definitely visit Khairat again and explore how I could continue to be associated with the project on an more regular basis.