Python on Sugar for OLPC

[tburger]

Hey everyone-

My name is Tom, and I am an undergraduate student at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. We are currently working on a coding event benefitting the One Laptop Per Child program. For those of you not familiar with the program, the idea is to provide computer access to every child in the world - making technological literacy a priority even in developing countries. OLPC is on a quest to produce the "$100 laptop" - thus facilitating this global computing movement. Our idea is to have teams of developers work on some lightweight applications for these laptops over the course of a week-long programming competition.

The catch is, the laptops run an OS called Sugar...and the majority of the pre-installed applications are written in python...

Two questions:

Is there anyone willing to volunteer some time/tutorials to get our coders up to speed before the competition?

Does anyone have any ideas for some cool educational apps that would well suited for implementation in python...current ideas include a graphing calculator app, flash cards, etc...

Thanks in advance for any ideas/suggestions

I would recommend checking out the OLPC site if you're interested...pretty cool stuff...

Until Again,

Tom

[Subsciber123]

Here are some cool ideas:

a chemical calculator with a periodic table of elements that you can click on to give you the properties of the element, and a text box where you can put in a chemical formula and it calculates the atomic mass, etc. http://www.nongnu.org/gchemutils/

a geometry tool, where you can manipulate objects that follow the rules of Euclidean geometry

an electrical CAD system

a 3D molecule or protein visualization tool

an ear-training program

a graphing tool

a statistical analysis tool

a word scramble game

a computer algebra system

a game to practice fractions

a program to learn the alphabet

a planetarium

a touch typing tutor

vocabulary practice

flashcards

a speech synthesizer

a drawing program

a tide predictor

[Laharl]

I'm doing an activity for OLPC myself (I go to RPI and a group of us are doing a small math activity), and, frankly, nearly all of those are far too advanced for the children. The laptop is going to go to illiterate elementary schoolers, so anything with lots of text is out if you want it to see any real use by the children, as is anything beyond basic arithmetic (maybe not even multiplication/division). Some useful tutorials are Activity Tutorial and Sugar's PyDoc. There's also a pyGTK activity tutorial on wiki.laptop.org, which has a useful way to structure code among files on Sugar. Honestly, though, expect to have to dig around that wiki a lot.