OLPC @ UCHICAGO — 1st Meetup (2/12/2008)
It feels like forever ago, but let me say that we had our 1st OLPC @ UCHICAGO meetup on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12th @ Chapin Hall.
The group was composed of folks from CUIP, USI, the Lab School, and an interested college student.
For the most part we did some background on the OLPC project (I have some slides that I need to post in a few places), some exploration of the machine itself, and then a mostly “curricular”-style discussion about where this kind of machine could fit into the American system.
I’ll be guilty of over-characterizing the discussion but there was a lot of energy for aiming these machines at 2nd-3rd-4th graders in the American context, interest in the potential of mesh networking, and a discussion about how the low-cost computing movement is going to dovetail with the increased promotion of 1-to-1 computing in education.
There were at least two important outcomes for the session:
1> The UofC folks got an opportunity to recommit to the idea of collaboration and will be trying to put together quarterly (if not monthly) topical meetings. We’ll be visiting the Lab school in March to see some scratch programming projects that middle school students are working on, and talking a bit more about the OLPC.
2> There’s a need to do a session more generally with students at the University, and an opportunity to connect those interested in computer science, education, and social justice together. This is something that I’ll be making some time to work on, and something that I could likely use help with.
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