3. "Physics with XO" Research Protocol as presented to the Council of Higher Education (CES)1
1. This Research Protocol is offered as introduction as it was presented before the CES at the end of 2011 for the purpose of requesting a special license for writing this work, in accordance to Art. 75 of the Statute of Teaching Staff. ↩
Summary.
The hardware of the XO laptop was designed to be able to connect low-cost, easy to build sensors to it, turning it into a powerful instrument for the acquisition, treatment and storage of data, allowing us to measure a variety of physical quantities such as voltage, resistance, light level, temperature, magnetic field, etc. This allows its usage in Natural Science activities in areas that extend from primary school (design games and basic measures), all of Secondary School and up to a Technical-Professional education.
We can process the information from the sensors by means of implementing computer programs written in the programming environments called Activities that are included with every XO. The "Measure" and "TurtleBlocks" Activities include tools designed exclusively for processing readings coming from the sensors. The Pippy Activity programming environment is also a versatile tool for beginning to program in the Python language, applicable for this project as well. It is also possible to enable the reading of sensors from the "Scratch" Activity.
At the end of 2009 I started to investigate the use of the XO (of Plan Ceibal) as a measuring instrument, connecting it to the physical world by means of sensors. These investigations are summarized in a Project that I call "Physics with XO", which I have summarized in the page of the same name at the Google Site of the Physics Laboratory of the "Liceo Solymar" N°.1 (2009).
Subject
XO, Sensors for the microphone input, Hardware, Software, "TurtleBlocks" Programming, Handbook of activities for experimental application to Natural Sciences.
Problem
The XO netbook (or subnotebook), as every user of it knows, is capable of recording and emitting sound, take pictures and record videos, as it embeds a microphone, two speakers and a digital camera. But it was also designed to be able to measure DC voltage and ohmic resistance through its external microphone input. This allows to transform it into a powerful and versatile tool to perform measurements of the most diverse physical quantities. By designing, calibrating and installing the appropriate low-cost sensors (we have set a cost limit to the sensors and accessories for each particular application of 200$UYU, about 8€EUR or 10$USD), we can transform this netbook for use in numerous applications.
This characteristic is generally unknown by users of the XO, either students or teachers, thereby losing an exceptional opportunity to give an unsuspected use that could encourage the creativity of our students, by making the synthesis of hardware and software concrete within a philosophy of technological appropriation, in contrast with classical end user applications.
There is also an additional problem: while every primary and secondary school student has an [XO netbook]2, the teachers got their XO replaced by an Olidata Jump PC, and secondary school teachers began receiving a Magalhães netbook, when neither of these netbooks offer the same capabilities as their student's XOs. This makes it practically impossible for teachers to explore everything their students can develop with their XO. It is therefore urgent to bring this knowledge to teachers since otherwise they have in practice no way to access it except laterally and/or indirectly.
2. Except for the high schools of Canelones which were given one of the models of JP SA Couto Magalhães (known as "Magallanes" MG2) ↩
Justification
It is our teachers, who have a right to know the capabilities of this tool, to whom we target this Project; they will know how to apply these leavening ideas to the activities that they deem useful. It is also a body of knowledge that students will have in their hands to explore and share in informal settings, as it has a huge recreational component.
Hypothesis
In 2012, the first generation of students that had access to Plan Ceibal will be going through first year of secondary school, and so a new dimension to the use of this tool in interaction with the physical world must be imprinted, initiating these young people in the basics of automatic data sampling and computerized control (which in turn constitutes an introduction to robotics).
Theoretical Framework
The OLPC Project (One Laptop Per Child) is an idea created in 2005 at the Media Lab of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that was presented in January of 2006 at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) by Nicholas Negroponte, one of its co-founders. It is a project based on the ideas of [Seymour Papert]3, [Alan Kay]4 and others, that has the goal of delivering a portable computer with access to the Internet to children who never had access to one. It is an Educational Project based in constructionism (Papert) and Free Software. Uruguay, by initiative of President Tabaré Vázquez, was the first country in the world to apply the project giving access to every single student and teacher of primary public education through Plan Ceibal.
In the words of one of its co-founders: "One Laptop Per Child is a project to transform education. It is about giving an opportunity to learn to children who don't have one. It is a matter of access, equity and giving the next generation of children of the developing world a brilliant and open future." - Walter Bender, [President of Software and Content of OLPC]5.
Since the beginning of the deployment of Plan Ceibal, our country has been a focus of world attention as to how it developed and its effect in relation to its stated objectives. It is a unique experience in which we are example for a huge number of communities that would like to deploy it. As in many other occasions, we must try to live up to our history, by setting the course between the option of technology appropriation and inclusion, or, conversely, dependence.
Grounds for the Importance of the Project in Education
None of the proposed applications need any special software to work or limit the inventiveness of our students, because if it is desired to show a sensor measurement on screen, record a table of values or make a graph of measurements as a function of time, all of this is done by a program written by the students themselves according to the objectives set and their creativity. We are faced with a project that does not reduce the teenager to a position of mere user or operator, but rather trains them as potential engineers that develop custom programs, as a sample of what they will be able to do if dedicate to it in the future; and if not, it gives everyone the opportunity to create, at least once, a computer program, to test the logical consistency of their reasoning by trying to run their written program code, experiencing "live logic" (as a tribute to Dr. Carlos Vaz Ferreira).
The graphical programming environment to be used is fundamentally the "TurtleBlocks" activity (known as "TurtleArt") which is a powerful tool (whose use is very intuitive and simple) that is installed on every XO.
This project clearly promotes national development by offering education to our youth in the construction of appropriate technology adapted to our country. It was however built collaboratively with many developers and OLPC volunteers both nationally and internationally.
3. Seymour Papert is a pioneer of artificial intelligence, inventor of the LOGO programming language in 1968. He is considered a prominent computer scientist, mathematician and educator. He worked closely with the educational psychologist Jean Piaget. ↩
4. Alan Kay is an american computer scientist, one of the fathers of Object Oriented Programming and creator of the Dynabook concept which defined the basis laptop and tablet computers. ↩
5. Interview of April 24, 2007, retrieved from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/El_Wiki_de_la_OLPC on 20/09/2011, at 22:50. Today Walter is board member of Sugar Labs (http://www.sugarlabs.org/). (N.T: Updated from 'Executive Director'). You can read more on his departure from OLPC at: http://www.olpcnews.com/people/leadership/walter_bender_resigned_from_olpc.html ↩