Open education in China

During the last couple of weeks, BUPT, who happens to have a campus near the school in 平西府村 (Pingxifu), has been donating machines to 信心 (xinxin) school. The computers where first installed upstairs in a new huge room and this week-end, the students helped to move the Greenboard classroom upstairs too. The new lab is huge and can now accommodate 60 students with a about ten spare machines.

Can I haz mah CCIE plz?

Regarding the network, we are still only have one switch connecting the teacher computer, 2 servers and 20 clients. I am hoping to get some of the BUPT students involved in Greenboard to make a network upgrade in the lab worth the investment. Until then, we will enjoy the existing setup featuring its one size does not quite fit them all cable length rolled under the teacher table. Am not too proud of it, let’s hope it’s temporary.

Of course the lab will also be used by LEAD on Saturdays for RUR-PLE and office classes. We plan to start those on the 26th.

Been playing with the Arduino for a couple of month now without much progress in the last weeks: we have not managed to get both motors moving at the same speed so far. Last week I saw a rather cheap remote control car on the upper shelf of one of the shops down the street and decided to get one and tear it apart to see how it works, here are the results (all you need is a cross tip screwdriver and a pair of scissors):

The car is a 威腾 360A, I got it for 58RMB, it can probably be found for a cheaper price on taobao, it is a very simple remote control car that can move forward and backward, turn left and right, flash some LEDs and play some music at a really annoying noise level (DON’T BUY IT FOR YOUR KIDS, you’ve been warned, tell your friends. Giving it a second thought, it is a really good gift for a kid whose parents have been pissing you off.)

Some pictures then, after unscrewing the upper part and removing the circuit, here is what it looks like, the three wires in the center are coming from the battery casing:


The back wheels are controlled by a small motor and a set of 3 gears. The wheels can be detached from the axis (they are not glued):


The front wheels are controlled by another motor to turn left or right:


Now taking a look at the car circuit, we have (clockwise, starting from 9 hours):

• The cables powering the back wheels motor
• The cables powering the front wheels motor
• a smaller board connected to the speaker and 2 other LEDs (whose cables had to be cut as they were stuck to the casing)
• 4 other LEDs
• And finally the battery connector

A closer look at the same circuit, transistors are used to control the functions transmitted by the remote control (see below):

The remote control now, there are 4 digital input buttons controlled by the two sticks. The user input are sent to the car using a pair of RX-2B / TX-2B chips:


Last but not least, the car is also shipped with a 4.8V 400mAh Ni-Cd battery along with its charger, pretty handy:

It’s not my board so I should start to thank the Quadcopter group from the Beijing Linux User Group and especially Barcode and Xuedi for lending me some of their gears. I wanted to start by playing around with easy and safe (meaning that cannot easily fry) components and learn the basic of the Arduino pseudo C language. All in all it was very easy thanks to the quality of the documentation that is available on the Arduino website. I worked with

• Analog input with a potentiometer
• Digital output with a row of LEDs that I used as a meter
• Analog outputs with a 180 degrees servo and a fading LED

The design of the board is quite messy if I take a picture of my breadboard (see bellow) so I also checked on Fritzing, the application that is used in most Arduino tutorials. It’s very easy to use, making nice designs is very straightforward:

And this is how it looks on my desk:

As some of you are probably already aware of, Ubuntu’s next release will feature an enlightenment based release of its netbook desktop. Initially, this was targeted for ARM devices that were not able to perform 3D acceleration and therefore run the “classic” version of the netbook desktop.
The code is available on launchpad and after building the enlightenment related dependencies (libeina, evas, ecore, eet, edje, elementary), it builds successfully on the latest Mandriva release on the Gdium, see (screenshot is clickable):



Unfortunately, the alternative theme is not working properly, it seems that moving elements are not drawn properly for the moment, I’ll have to check that into more details and see if I can find out what’s going wrong. I will also see if I can replace default icons with the icon set that is used on Mandriva’s iDesk configuration but that’s an encouraging start

Last but not least, because we are having issues with our ICP registration at greenboard.org.cn, this blog is now hosted by Fred along with a temporary mirror for Greenboard. Thanks!

It took around 30 hours to compile on a Gdium, several tries due to some silly mistakes but, finally, I got OOo4Kids (Open Office For Kids) running on the Gdium, in simplified Chinese. OOo4Kids is an office suite based on OpenOffice.org and designed for young children (7 to 12 years old). The contributors of the project have made considerable efforts to simplify the user interface and the code and the result is pretty amazing, see by yourself with two screenshots of Calc, the top one from OpenOffice.org, the bottom one from OOo4Kids (images are clickable):

First obvious thing is the great work that has been done on the user interface, OOo4Kids provides a GUI with larger icons in a lower number that makes the software much easier to use for kids. On the top of that, notice how placing the icons on the left side of the window helps making a much better usage of vertical space, this is particularly efficient for netbooks that offer a screen resolution of 1024×600, or sometimes even lower than that.

This said, I also want to mention that OOo4Kids is not only a great project in term of how useful it is for teaching office software to young kids, the development of OOo4Kids itself is also very education oriented. The main maintainer Eric Bachard is working hard on getting students from French and other countries universities involved into the project, providing them support and guidance on the IRC channels and mailing lists. Without these efforts, digging into OOo’s code would be extremely time-consuming and OOo4Kids would have far less contributers.

I now certainly hope to have risen some interest, you can learn more about OOo4Kids in:

• The project page
• The French IRC channel, #educooo on Freenode
• The English IRC channel, #education.openoffice.org on Freenode
• Educooo.org, the French association that is managing the project

Now there is still a lot to be done, the next steps are going to be checking the localization, providing any missing strings, integrate OOo4Kids in the operating systems used by Greenboard (the next version of the customized GLinux we are using will feature a switch to allow teachers choosing between classical OOo and OOo4Kids) and of course prepare and write some content. So you’ll read about OOo4Kids soon on this blog and on Greenboard.

This week-end we have been for the second time to a new school with the volunteers from LEAD. The school is located in the north of Beijing, between 天通苑 (Tiantongyuan) and the north 6th road. We were already there last week but we could not start the computer class yet because we had to check the computer room first and see what we could do with it. The school has about 15 computers with low-end hardware, typically Pentium II or Pentium III (300 to 500 MHz) with 64MB of memory running Windows 98, Me or 2000. We have spent two Saturday morning checking the computers, merging working parts into new units and sometimes reinstalling operating systems and in the end, managed to get 6 computers running on Saturday and 3 others for which we just need to install a new system.

One of the big challenges I am facing in these kind of cases is to find a way to install Linux on these computers. The schools usually do not have a lot of requirements but they would still ask for compatibility with the Microsoft Office suite and of course Chinese support. I have not been very lucky with the Chinese version of Puppy Linux: 小芭比Linux, the CD would not boot on every computer and burning the image on a USB disk using the provided tool has not worked for me and there is still quite some work to be done on the localization side. On the top of that, I am not sure that Puppy running on a 64MB PII@400MHz would be able to run Open Office but we should certainly not give up and I would greatly appreciate any advice on that field. So, for the time being, I swallowed my pride and got RUR-PLE running on those machines with Windows 2000.

RUR-PLE is quite an amazing educational application, the principle is to teach young kids (we usually work with grades 4, 5 or 6 kids) how to write programing code in Python by piloting a little robot:

The screenshot above shows the main window of the application, the robot on the right side is executing the instructions from the left side when the user clicks on the play button. It proves to be extremely efficient with young students, most of them enjoy experimenting with the robot and solving the problems that are given to them. (for example, guiding the robot through a maze). This is actually the reason why I like this application so much, I wrote that RUR-PLE was teaching how to use python but in practice, what it does teach is problem solving, it does not really matter if the children can write Python code at the end of the term, what is important is the time they spent finding solutions for the problems that were submitted to them. RUR-PLE is available in Chinese too, it was localized by the Greenboard team a few years ago and it comes with a set of 40 lessons that have also been localized by some LEAD and Greenboard volunteers.

So LEAD is now providing RUR-PLE classes in two schools, children have been using volunteers laptops while we were working on the refurbishing but starting from next week, they will be able to use at least 6 of their own computers, and hopefully 10 in the week after.

Great news this week, we have delivered the 20 Gdiums to the Wende school. The school is located in Laiguangying (来广营), the area that is beyond Wangjing (望京), outside of the 5th ring road in Beijing (google map). The school is a migrant worker school, which basically means that it is a private school for the the migrant workers kids who are not allowed to go to public schools. What typically happens is that parents who are coming to Beijing for work bring their kid with them until they reach middle school when they go back to their province of origin to attend class. As a result, the suburbs of Beijing, especially the part outside of the 5th ring road of the Chaoyang (朝阳) and Haidian (海淀) districts, have a lot of those schools. Wende is one of them with about 250 kids and also a kindergarten that has just opened this year.

Now that the hardware is deployed we are going forward to the next steps: the installation of the hardware and the first training session for the school teachers. Both of them will be done on Tuesday (September 22nd). The hardware installation is quite simple, on the top of the 20 Gdiums, we will also setup a classroom server and a wireless local network. The server will provide an intranet, some tools to manage the Gdiums and some supervision applications for the teachers. The first training session will be in the afternoon from 2PM to 6PM and will cover GLinux (the gdium OS) and GCompris. The GLinux version we are using is a customized version based on the April release from Mandriva, the main differences are better Chinese support, updated application list and a few cosmetic changes on the interface. The work done has been posted on the OLPH wiki and issues are managed on the OLPH bug tracker.

Finally, on a more personal note, we are also going to move to the city center by the end of September. We are renting an empty apartment in a Hutong near Beixinqiao (北新桥). It will much closer to the office for me and it will have a guest bedroom (well a convertible sofa in the living-room actually) making it easier for us to host visitors.

So I am starting a blog too, I know I’m late, I know I used to claim that blogs were mostly useless pieces of crap but well, a lot of things are going to happen in September and I feel frustated about not being able to share, promote and comment on them. This blog will make it possible and hopefully it will raise from the “useless piece of crap” category to something at least a little bit useful.

What’s happening in September anyway? Well a lot of things, starting with our open education project, we are going to start a trial in a Chinese migrant workers school which will probably take most of my time for the next two weeks, there is a lot to organize and to do: finalize and fine-tune the operating system (GLinux, a customized version of Mandriva), check and deliver the hardware (Gdiums), organize training sessions and of course support the teachers in the school. Later on this month will be the Software Freedom Day on Saturday 19th which the Beijing LUG has been helping to organize and after that, a second school project in which Greenboard is also involved is likely to start moving at the end of the month. On the top of that, there will be the usual activities, BLUG meetings, week-ends in schools with LEAD and so on.

I’ll give more details about what it’s all about in the next posts but just to get started:

• The BLUG is the local Linux User Group in Beijing, we do monthly meeting on every second Tuesday of the month and more technical and social activities, check the website here
• The Gdium is the computer I am working on, it’s a MIPS based netbook using a Chinese CPU, there is a hacker community working on the machine, see the OLPH website
• Greenboard non-profit organization that focuses on open education using open source softwares and open content. That’s were this blog is hosted
• LEAD (Let Education Achieve Dreams) or 阳光志愿者 in Chinese is a Beijing volunteer group that is delivering classes to migrant workers schools during the week-end

That’s it for now. I am still working on the look and feel of the site, I am quite happy with the template but I’d like to change a couple of things, bullets do not seem to work for a start.

Edited on 2009 September 15th, the CSS and the template are more or less fixed now:

• Listed items are now show with a square bullet
• Since I don’t plan to use categories, I have removed all the “Posted in …” in the template