Watch Dan Ariely on TED

Our advisor Dan Ariely recently gave a talk about cheating and dishonesty at TED2009. The video will be posted next Tuesday; until then, check out the TED blog for an in depth article about Dr. Ariely's opinion on the Bernie Madoff scandal. 

Dr. Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and is the author of recent best-seller Predictably Irrational. From OLPC@Duke's beginning, Dr. Ariely has been one of our most important advisors and benefactors, and has been tremendously important to the success of our organization. We're all very excited to see what Dr. Ariely will have to say in this talk. I can guarantee that it'll be insightful. 

XO-2

A few pictures have popped up here and there of the XO-2, the next generation low-cost OLPC laptop. The prototype has been generating a lot of buzz since some concept images were released some months ago. The device has a dual screen layout and is meant to be held like a book. The design is much more intuitive for classroom use and will hopefully be a lot easier to teach with. We're really surprised to be seeing an actual prototype of the XO-2 this so soon after the concept images were released.

Nicolas Negroponte has also made some comments about the future of the XO design philosophy and marketing strategy, saying that the device will have open source hardware to encourage design improvement by people outside of the OLPC team. This could mean companies that currently manufacture netbook lines (Acer, ASUS and the like) will push to copy the XO-2's dual screen design. Negroponte has also made claims of the laptop costing $75, less than half the cost of the XO-1.

We'd love to get our hands on some of these when they're eventually released. I can only begin to imagine how great it would be to have an XO-2 classroom at Carter within the next year.

New Year Update

First of all, Happy New Year and thank you for following OLPC@Duke's progress! The following are some quick updates to keep everybody informed. First some organizational information:

• We've been graciously donated $500 by the Engineering Alumni Council to progress our program in the future. We'll post updates as we get the chance to spend the money on new equipment, the kids, and our organization.
  
• Thanks to Emily Poplawski, we've been featured in the DukEngineer magazine. The article can be found at the bottom of this post.
  
• We will soon be preparing for a fundraiser in April. More on that soon.
  
• We are also pursuing a collaboration with Duke organization Project Child. This will be integral in growing our organization in the future.
  

Now for some updates on the pilot program:

• Our members are still going into the classroom on a weekly basis, helping with the laptops and enriching the students' education.
  
• Recently, the some of the kids have been bringing their laptops home in order to do work and play the educational games that we placed on the laptops.
  
• Mr. Reynolds, the 4th grade teacher, has told us that the laptops are being used almost on a daily basis, and the students are still very excited every time they get to make use of them.
  
• As of right now, three of the laptops have broke in various ways. In the next week we will be working to fix these laptops.
  

Thanks again for your continued interest. Please email us if you have any further questions.

DukEngineer OLPC Article

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Magazines Periodicals & Report olpc@duke olpcatduke

Feature in Duke Engineering Magazine

A new article about OLPC@Duke was published in Duke's Engineering Magazine. Check out the article here.

Give One, Get One resumes

The Give One, Get One program has started up again. Those interested in purchasing their own XO (and also donating one) can now do it on Amazon. Hopefully we'll see less distribution headaches this time around now that Amazon is handling the whole process. Information Week has more.

Week 5 & Week 7 Pilot Update

These Past two weeks, we've introduced the fourth graders to two software programs the XO laptops offer, TamTam Mini and Scratch.  

TamTam Mini is an introductory music-making program.  Children use the program to play a Halloween song using the keyboard to play notes. 

Scratch is an introductory programming language.  Students dragged blocks of code together, which fit like puzzle pieces.

Both were enjoyable activities and the fourth graders were encouraged to make music and program on their own.  

Neighborhood View 

Students like to take pictures

Composing Songs

Class room view

Fourth grader plays her song

Week 4 Pilot Update

This update's a bit late, but it's still definitely worth reading.

Notes

• The activity that we ended up doing with the students is creating a election-themed button, either in support of a candidate or that says "I Voted"
• We threw in a lot of information about politics in general, such as the colors generally associated with the major parties
  
• We taught the students how to use the paint activity a bit more
• The students had a lot of trouble choosing colors. This ranged from outline color versus fill color, as well as the horrible color chooser. Whatever happened to offering up a generic color palette?
  
• Please let us know if we're wrong, but text inserted into a picture in the paint application doesn't seem as if it can be resized
  
• The students really loved the undo feature (as opposed to using the eraser), although I think the idea of undoing will need to be reinforced
  
• Saving/loading had to be retaught to many of the students - but of course it's not the most intuitive thing in the world
• We'll put up an example of the works that the students came up with soon.
  
• One final question: Why can't students name paintings for the purpose of saving? I realize that it can be redundant given the fact that the picture will be thumbnailed for the Journal, but should that be the choice of the student?
  

The pictures are again posted on Flickr here. In Week 5, we didn't work with the students because they were on a school-wide field trip. They probably had more fun anyway :). Looking forward to Week 6, which will be chronicled on the blog by Emily Poplawski, our new Head of Communications.