After holding the workshop in Sao Jose dos Campos, the team from the Institute for Geoinformatics, Münster headed to Campinas to perform a series of tests on spatial ability of children at the school “Padre Emilio Miotti” in Campinas. These tests and activities were made in cooperation and with the support of the NIED, an institute of UNICAMP. We would like them to thank them for help and support.
The tests conducted there followed the same pattern as the tests performed in Kigali, Rwanda last year and at St. Mauritz school in Muenster. First a pre-test to assess the spatial abilities was performed by the children, then they used the Geo-Activity (developed by Henning) on OLPC´s XO laptops. The main goal of this activity is to foster the spatial learning of kids. This was then verified by a second round of post-tests with the kids. The results of this testing will be incorporated into Thomas Ph.D. Thesis.
The activity is now deployed onto a significant number of XO-laptops at this school, and at the end of June, Philippe Rieffel will participate in an event to teach the teachers how to use this software in the future. To ensure the future use and to thank the school and NIED for their support, the GL@PS left 6 GPS-receivers at the school, which are necessary to use the software, since the XO 1.5 does not have a build in GPS chip.
Philippe will stay with NIED for some more time to work on the software deployment as well as to do research for his upcoming Master´s Thesis (more on this will be posted soon).

Some Impressions from the work at school:

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Hey out there,

took a long time since I posted the last progress step. We did some tests again in Bodelschwinghschule and refined collaboration functionality for the Geo activity.

We created some screenstories which tell you more about the workflow for each plugin we can provide for now (Geocaching and Geotagging). This is the first screenstory telling about the Geocaching, a later blog article will give you information about Geotagging.

First startup the Geo game and choose the Geocaching activity.

Start the Geo activity

Choose plugin (within Geo a plugin represents the actual activity)

Hide treasure somewhere

Treasure placed

Share the activity

Two players join activity

Display treasure

Player I found the treasure first

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After our first test at Bodelschwinghschule we are planning further tests. Our activity and the plugins are growing, so we would like to test how the actual learning benefits are, when playing around with the Geo activity. Therefore we create some pre-/posttests which will indicate such benefit.

Our near future road map looks like this:

Furtheron another Hack Night is going to be planned.

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For the usability test at the Bodelschwinghschule I enabled geocaching functionality for the XO. For now the geocaches are hardcoded for each laptop, though. You can display the cache by clicking the ‘Show Cache’ button. Your position is displayed by default.

Another progress  made is to enable collaboration via the great groupthink library by Benjamin M. Schwartz (get it from its repository). It offers several shared datastructures. The new version of the Pippy activity and Arithmetic are using it already. It look very promising and I’m sure it is a very good approach to encapsulate the collaboration things a developer has to do (even though, the Hello Mesh activity gives a good example how to start with collaboration on an XO).

However, I managed to connect several XOs to let them share the geospace activity. Visulization stuff is in progress; for now only the positions of each XO user is shared, logged and updated.

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After playing around with the XO, Sugar and python I have managed to embed html into the application. Have a look at the first raw snapshots:

The user can choose available geomodules. Graphics for each plugin will follow..

These pictures were captured within the sugar emulator coming with Debian Linux Lenny. I’ll test it on an XO soon, to see, how it performs there.

Using openlayers in a gtk.widget as embedded html.

Sure, many functionality is still missing, but this will be a step-by-step process. First the basics, other tools and modules will follow iteratively. I appreciate any comments and ideas. Feel free to comment .

I know that the XOs don’t necessarily have internet connections in rural areas. This is only a play-around, but most probably will become part of the geospace framework API. Besides that some offline raster georeferencing tools will also become part of the API.

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