A Term With Plan Ceibal

On Tuesday, I visited an escuela especial--a school for kids with disabilities--with several other ceibalJAM! volunteers to test out a new program. The XOs have a game called Memorize, which volunteers have converted into an accessible version. Instead of using the keys and touch pad, the student can navigate the game by pushing a lever to the side with his head. We also tested a PC game called Plaphoons that uses the same technique. The tester was a 9-year-old boy named Nelson, who Roxana told us is very smart and likes computers, but he can't use regular computer games on his own because he is mostly paralyzed. Using the lever, he played both games successfully and seemed to be having a great time. Here's the video we made about it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZctBPnzC4U
At the end, Roxana is telling Nelson that volunteers are working on more games he can play this way, and asking what he thinks--that's what elicits the big smile.

Saturday was ceibalJAM7! (The exclamation mark is part of the name). So far I've been to miniJAMs, which meet for a few hours to work on one development project. A full ceibalJAM, however, takes most of a day and breaks into groups to work on a variety of projects. There were five projects at this one:
-Pippy, a game that teaches the basics of programming in Python.
-Creating more examples and class plans for Scratch, which also teaches programming.
-Making programs accessible for kids with disabilities
-Conozco, originally a quiz game about Uruguay's geography that is now being extended to other topics.
-Exploring possibilities for new games using a tool called pygame
Despite the fact that all of the buses and most of the taxis were on strike, there was a good-sized crowd with a wide range of programming backgrounds. Here's a photo of the Scratch group working on the laptops. Video to come.

Last Saturday, I went to a free software convention called FLISOL, held downtown in a gorgeous old building that I thought might be a museum, but turned out to be a public high school. These events are held all over Latin America, and are intended to introduce people to the world of free software and allow current users to meet and learn from each other. There seemed to be a wide range of people attending, i.e. not just programmers and students. ceibalJAM! had a table with some XOs set up for people to play with, where people could learn about different projects. All the software ceibalJAM! works with is free software. This means that it is free to use and distribute, which is important because we want to distribute it to students without requiring schools to spend a lot on software. However, it also means that the code is freely available so that others can learn from it and reuse it, which increases the quantity and quality of software produced overall. There were a variety of other free software-related organizations there as well--openOffice, Mozilla, etc. Different groups gave speeches throughout the day. My friend Ismael told me that Linux is a hard sell in Uruguay in part because most operating systems are pirated versions of Windows, so are already free. Hence the slogan here: "Free software is a question of liberty, not price"--the idea is that even if you don't pay to use Windows, you're still contributing to its dominance.


A short video about the event is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219hWnCJ00A

On Monday, I had my first meetings with the groups from Flor de Ceibo that I'll be working with. The first group, which will be working in rural areas, is almost all girls, many of whom are studying education or psychology. The second group is more mixed and has many engineering students. It's hard for me to understand long talks in Spanish, so I hope I'm not missing crucial information. In the evening, there was a larger event for all of the Flor de Ceibo groups, and several people gave talks about how Flor de Ceibo has evolved, its importance to society, and the sorts of problems facing Plan Ceibal. For example, one goal is for the laptops to be a resource for parents as well, so they discussed reasons parents weren't using the computer--some don't know how, some are afraid of breaking it, some thought it was just for kids, etc. There are more meetings this week, and next weekend I'm going to visit a school in Rivera with the second group.

This weekend, I left Montevideo and went to a little town on the eastern coast called Cabo Polonio with a few friends from the hostel. It's on a peninsula blocked off from the nearest road by six kilometers of forest and sand dunes, so the bus drops you off on the side of the road and you take a Jeep into town. It doesn't have electricity or running water, and the year round population is about 80 people. It's fall now here, so things were quiet. Here's a view of the whole town:


We rented a creatively decorated little casita for $30 a night, split five ways. It had different colored bottles stuck in the walls to let the light in.



On Saturday, we explored the rocky tip of the peninsula where the sea lions hang out. From far away, their cries sound like people on a roller coaster.





On the way back, we met some friendly old men in Speedos, who offered us the local specialty: deep fried seaweed balls. They're better than they sound!


We decided to collect some seaweed and make our own. The traditional recipe is just seaweed and a batter made from flour, eggs, milk, and a little sugar, but we added garlic, onion, and cheese to ours, and they looked disgusting but were actually delicious.

On Sunday, we headed in the other direction, toward the sand dunes. From the tops, there were amazing views of the ocean, dunes, and town that my photos completely fail at capturing, but here's one anyway:


We'd heard there was a forest of ombu trees, and thought it was the forest we could see beyond the dunes, but it turns out you have to take a boat to the ombu forest and we were out of time. The forest beyond the dunes turned out to be made up mostly of a variety of pine tree with needles a foot long and white pine cones, which was interesting too, but not quite as cool as ombu trees.

I'm back in Montevideo now, and looking forward to starting more work with Flor de Ceibo. I have another meeting in an hour with the first group, the one working in rural areas.