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The Surprise Involvement

I have been back at Olin for slightly over a week. Move-in was last Tuesday, and I went about unpacking all of my things. Wednesday night, the night before classes begin, I happened to be walking through one of the lounges in the dorm. I was approached by Sarah, and here is how the conversation went:

Sarah: Greg! Come to the OLPC meeting!
Greg: Who what when where why?
Sarah: Mel OLPC now Cambridge to talk.
Greg: Sweet let’s go.

We proceeded to print Google maps, get in a car, drive to Cambridge, get lost, get unlost, and park near the OLPC offices, which are right near MIT.

At OLPC, a bunch of engineers showed off the hardware and software running on the XOs and talked to us about their goals with the project. They’ve done a very excellent job considering the needs and means of their users, who will primarily be elementary school aged children in developing nations. Everything is super ruggedized, super low power consumption, and super simplified. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do anything on an XO the first time I played with one, but that is only because I am so used to the interface presented by traditional UI schemes like those in Windows and Linux.

After we got to see all the fun stuff, we went into the conference room (every wall was a whiteboard, sweet), and Mel explained why she had us all there. Mel is of the Olin Class of 2007, and has been interning at OLPC for a while. Their volunteer network is rather loosely organized, but she is heading up a project to get colleges and universities involved in sort of “volunteer chapters” similarly to the way that Habitat for Humanity is organized. We brainstormed a lot, and some cool ideas for how this all could be structured came out.

The Brainstorming

The neatest concept I took away from it all was making projects in classes actually matter, rather than being graded once and thrown in a drawer. Have your music composition class license its final projects under CC and release them to the Internet. Have your software design class make something to actually fix a problem someone is having. Have your education class prepare a curriculum that isn’t just hypothetical, but could actually be implemented somewhere where a well-written math curriculum is needed.

With this concept in mind, I brainstormed a bunch of ideas with other people here at Olin. Some kids in POE, our “build stuff with microcontrollers” class, wanted to develop hardware peripherals for the OLPC. Lots of these hardware peripherals need software on the PC to do interesting things with the data they collect. The wireless networking mesh that the XOs use presents a lot of interesting possibilities for distributed applications.

The Proposition
With clear student interest in the project, I met with the visiting Software Design professor, Matt Jadud on Tuesday. It turns out he is very familiar with the technical side of developing for XOs, and was very familiar with and excited about the OLPC project. I caught him up to speed and told him about the strong student interest, and our close link to OLPC provided by Mel. We talked about some of the possibilities for integration between Software Design and POE, and how this would provide a much more interesting final project for the course.

Matt said he would talk to the applicable curricular people, and left to go set up a meeting with Oscar, who is teaching POE this semester, and so the ball was out of my court.

It Happens

It was decided that developing our final projects for the XO would be good experience, worthwhile for a good cause, and a lot more fun than just writing our own bits of software. The edges haven’t been roughed out yet, but we’re either going to do some sort of transition into a different language (likely Python) and write apps in that for the XO, or simply write them in Scheme, which is the language we are already learning in the class. There will be the potential for crossover with POE, so Software Design groups can write software to support devices built by POE groups.

So, in about a week, we went from a blue-sky idea to having it implemented in the curriculum for two classes this semester. Sweet.