Chris, Michael, and I just submitted a short paper describing our work on the XO-3 Nell project to this year's Interaction Design and Children conference. Give the preprint a read: Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy [pdf].

We're hard at work implementing Nell. We could use help in a number of areas: art, animation, story, ( Read more... )

Here are some banged-together demos of various pieces of One Laptop per Child's Project Nell. The ultimate goal is a Nell demo for CES in January 2012, but these bits should be considered as tech demos, benchmarks, and proofs of concept, not actual pieces of that demo (yet).

Most of these demos require WebGL support. Visit get.webgl.org for ( Read more... )

Between now and January CES, Chris Ball and I will be building Nell for the OLPC XO-3 tablet. Nell is a name, not an acronym, but if you want to pronounce it as "Narrative Environment for Learning Learning," I won't stop you.

Nell's development will be demo-oriented-we're going to try to write the most ( Read more... )

One Laptop per Child creates student-centric learning experiences. Our current software stack, however, is somewhat "shallow". When you turn on the XO, all the content is immediately available but there is no path or guidance provided. Nothing suggests what you should try first, or indicates an order to progress through the activities provided ( Read more... )

Today I stumbled across some very interesting projects by Nickolay Platonov which I'd like to discuss in an OLPC context.

I've been hacking away at TurtleScript fueled partly by a drive for minimalism: a small system is a learnable system. To that end, the language is based on Douglas Crockford's "Simplified JavaScript" (as recognized by this top ( Read more... )

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Chris Ball has done an excellent job posting video from all the talks at EduJam in Montevideo. I gave talks on Sugar, Education, and Tablets, The Diamond Age, Internationalization Everywhere, and Sugar on Android and Native Client.

I've reached the end of the month. I've accomplished my Android and NativeClient-related goals, but didn't get the time to do as much mesh and python investigation as I'd wanted. Here are some ideas for next month's work. (Next week I'll be in Uruguay for EduJAM.)
GObject Introspection (Android or NaCl)

1. Start by porting libffi. An android port ( Read more... )

At the end of my Sugar/Android week, I had a simple Pango-on-Cairo demo running. This was built on a stack of ported libraries, including gettext, pixman, freetype, libxml2, fontconfig, and glib, as well as cairo and pango. You can run the demo yourself by sideloading pango-demo.apk onto your Android device (tested on a Motorola Xoom), and you ( Read more... )

This post will describe the state of Native Client in general, based on week 2 of my original four week plan. In the next post, I'll link to my work so far, and compare the Native Client and the Android efforts. Recapping, the end goal of these explorations is a platform for the next generation of the Sugar learning environment.

To begin, the ( Read more... )