TechnikBasteln – Technology Tinkering

Thanks to sponsorship via the 6th NetIdee call of the Internet Foundation Austria (IPA) we at OLPC (Austria) were able to launch a new project in November 2011 - TechnikBasteln (which half-decently translates into Technology Tinkering):

“TechnikBasteln is an innovative and interdisciplinary project which is focused on children. They are accompanied by us in experiencing, learning about, and understanding information and communication technologies (ICT) in workshops. Among other topics, these workshops address how computers and mobile phones work, the structure of the Internet, and how to safely use these tools and technologies.”

Since November 2011 Tanja and me have spent a lot of time planning and preparing these workshops, researching about other projects and content related to what we want to achieve, contacting teachers, schools, and other organizations to let them know what we’re doing, etc.

Now this week we launched the second phase of our project as we held the first two workshops in primary schools here in Vienna. The first one was focused on some of the basic technologies of the Internet and the second one was all about the building blocks of modern computers. We had a great time in both classes, the children also seemed to like what we were doing, we got good feedback from the teachers, and while there is room for improvements overall the concepts we had developed over the past few months worked really well.

So even though the past few days were really busy and intense (and I’m now in dire need of a relaxing weekend!) I’m also very happy with the progress we’ve made with TechnikBasteln and am already very much looking forward to our next workshops.

Projects keeping me busy

As previously mentioned I'm having quite a busy week, almost too busy one might argue.

olpcnews.com is certainly take a fair amount of my time as there's a lot happening in OLPCland these days. Luckily we are getting many high quality guest contributions at the moment which makes things quite a bit easier for us. There's no way we could talk about all the ongoing developments, issues and deployments ourselves. Even as it is today I've got a couple of article ideas and no clue when to actually sit down and write them (I hope to get one done on the train-ride to Vienna on Friday). But I really enjoy reading other people's thoughts and opinions so it's all good fun.

The next big item on this week's to-do list is the OLPC BookSprint which takes place in Austin, Texas and is supported by various remote contributors. The goal of the Sprint is to produce a high-quality manual for the XO and Sugar. I'm currently working on the chapter about the newly introduced Sugar Control Panel and hope to get a rough draft finished by tonight. As always with documentation project things are taking a little longer than expected, especially when you have to dig around for information on what certain features actually do. But then again, I really like working on tech-documentation and also enjoy using the FLOSS Manuals solution, only wishing I had known about it when we started working on the OLPC Activity Handbook.

I'm also helping organize the OLPC and Sugar presence at FUDCon Brno 2008, a big gathering of the Fedora Linux community, which takes place in Brno (Czech Republic) from Friday, September 5 to Sunday, September 7. We still have a fair share of work ahead of us in the 9 days before the event starts but I'm sure we're going to have a blast and it will be great to finally meet some of the core Sugar developers and to see other colleagues and friends again.

On top of all that I'm also working on two smaller independent side-projects which I hope to be able to talk about here soon. Both of them are close to my heart and things I've been wanting to do for quite some time. It's great that I finally got together with the right people to really start things up but as ever so often it will require many sleepless nights to get things off the ground and turn ideas into something tangible.

The good thing about all those projects is that a majority of the grunt work should be completed within the next 4 weeks, just in time for university to start and take over the majority of my waking hours.

Anyway, back to work...