188 Entries for “Recent Blogs”
-
READ MOREFeb. 20, 2014 | Team Reflections | OLE Nepal
Chandi Devi: Voluntourist Ventures into the Field
The day I had been eagerly awaiting has finally arrived. My first visit to a school with our laptop program, Chandi Devi Primary School. I met with Roshan, my fellow software developer and friend from OLE Nepal, at Lagankhel bus stop at 8 am on a sunny Sunday morning to set off for Dukuchaap, one of the nearest deployments just south of Kathmandu. As I had expected, our journey soon turned into a bumpy ride on an unpaved road. Traveling through Nakhkhu, Sainbu, and Bungamati, we arrived to Dukuchaap shortly after 10:00 am. At the bus stop, we met with an English teacher from Chandi Devi, who guided us through a steep winding path to the top of a hill, where children were just about to start the first school day of the week. Yes, you read that correctly. Here in Nepal, a week has six working days with Saturday being the only holiday of the week.
-
READ MOREAug. 28, 2013 | Program Updates | OLE Nepal
The Road to Phaplu
The harrowing journey along a precarious mountain highway taken by OLE Nepal’s team of trainers and technical staff to reach program schools in Solukhumbu. “Phaplu airport is closed for upgradation. All flights are now landing on a makeshift landing strip in Kangel, a couple of hours from Phaplu”. The news welcomed me. After having flown twice to Phaplu within the last year, the adrenaline- or rather the thrill- associated with landing on a strip consisting of loose gravel has notably decreased. A makeshift airport. Landing there should be quite an experience.
-
READ MOREAug. 6, 2013 | Learning Games Development | OLE Nepal
Getting Ready for XO-4 Touch.
Although it may be difficult to give a black and white picture of the impact of OLPC laptops on school children, one thing is very evident – children love to play with laptops, utterly. And this, I think, is the idea of the program – engaging young minds with a device filled with educational materials. Software and contents always grow bigger over time. Computer memory always tends to be insufficient. In the remote villages of Nepal, XO1 has proved itself to be a rugged and durable learning machine. Now it is time to give way to the newer verion -XO-4. There are several major advancement over XO-1, for example, efficient processor architecture, increased processing speed, bigger disk space and bigger memory. But introduction of touchscreen is the most exciting and remarkable difference.
-
READ MOREMarch 19, 2013 | Learning Games Development | OLE Nepal
Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. (Source: Wikipedia) We also got hands on the much acclaimed Raspberry-Pi, thanks to OLE Inc in Cambridge, USA. We have tested to see if we could replace our traditional school server with Raspberry-Pi model B. However, Raspberry Pi couldn’t handle the the task when we loaded our digital library E-Pustakalaya on it. Though the page were browsable, the performance was very slow. We replaced Apache with Nginx and optimized Mysql, but still the CPU power was not powerful enough.
-
READ MOREMarch 19, 2013 | Program Updates | OLE Nepal
Better and Faster OLPC laptops
We are excited about moving to the new XO-4 laptops for upcoming deployments. XO-4 uses power efficient processor based on ARM technology and has expanded storage space. It has the same sturdy design as its predecessors that have earned a reputation for durability and withstood heavy usage by students in rural schools in Nepal.