It is already two weeks ago that Martina Forster (ESRI Germany) and I met the OLPC team in Kigali/Rwanda, which is led by OLPCs vice president David Cavallo. They are supporting Rwandas OLPC activities and set up a Center for Laptops and Learning, which aims to serve the educational and learning needs of countries across Africa. It is a tremendous challenge and they are doing a great job!
We discussed the geospatial issue and our ideas and goals about developing XO-activities as a means to playfully learning basic concepts like position, direction, distance..
We soon realized, that were working on the same idea and that a closer cooperation would yield significant benefits. We agreed to integrate our field studies with schools in Rwanda into their OLPC camps next year. Furthermore we will collaborate both in the conceptual phase and in the evaluation of the field tests. This helps us in terms of organizational issues and is of benefit for the OLPC project as we are providing new elements into the educational program.
So were looking foreward to our OLPC camp in Rwanda, which is preliminarily scheduled for April 2010 now.