2. Prologue
In the month of June of the year 2009, all students of Escuela N°224 at El Pinar (Canelones, Uruguay) were receiving their XO1 laptop from Plan Ceibal. Among them, the youngest of my children, providing us with a first contact with this netbook.
Researching about its structure and operation I found out from the OLPC wiki that it had been designed with a unique ability in mind: to build and program inexpensive sensors to measure physical quantities. The next step was to find out which of the Activities included in SUGAR would allow to program the reading of these sensors: the one that seemed most appropriate was "Measure", but it did not allow programming, and the included programming environments could not read the sensors. This is how I began a long journey that began the 15th of September of 2009 writing the first research note with progress on the topic (developed at the Physics Laboratory of Liceo Solymar N°1), published at the "Physics with XO" website and culminating in this work.
Numerous people have collaborated with it; I'd like to highlight Walter Bender especially (co-founder of OLPC and Sugar Labs) who responded immediately to my initial questions about the right Activity to use and, later, all the rest. He put me in touch with Tony Forster, who was intensely working in parallel on the subject from Australia (his work is referenced at SUGARLABS SENSORS). His enormous generosity with this work was remarkably helpful. Christoph Derndorfer (Austria) has published many of the applications described here in the OLPC News page.
At the series of events made to spread the word about this work, we were accompanied and supported by the ceibalJAM! community (mainly through Gabriel Eirea), the BUTIÁ team (Andrés Aguirre, Alan Aguiar, Federico Andrade, Guillermo Reisch, Aylen Ricca and others) at the Faculty of Engineering (UdelaR), by Prof. Bettina Corti from the Head Office of the Artigas Teaching Intitute, by Prof. Walter Fernández, Magela Fuzatti (Plan Ceibal), the Network of Supporters of Plan Ceibal (RAP Ceibal), as well as many teachers, professors, students of Education, primary and secondary school students that came to the conferences, exhibitions and workshops.
I would like to thank the colleagues who agreed to review the draft of this work and improved it with contributions: Prof. Alejandra Delgado, Prof. Gustavo Castro, Prof. Pablo García and Dr. Ismael Núñez.
Professor Daniel Baccino deserves special mention, not only for thoroughly reviewing the work in parallel as it was being written, but also for accompanying the construction and promotion of this project, participating on several occasions. The experience of working with him as a team has been very enriching for me.
Guzmán Trinidad