Hello Laptop, Hello World, Hello Nicaragua with OLPC
Hello Laptop, Hello World (Digital Literacy Project's prior name) established two pilot programs in the Cambridge area and plans to expand outreach with an international pilot program in Nicaragua in January 2010. In collaboration with the Deaf Association, Hello Laptop, Hello World will create an online database with videos of sign language and design an XO application to establish and maintain this database.
Two Projects Win i3 Grants
Two teams of undergraduate entrepreneurs were each awarded $15,000 on March 31 to realize their respective commercial and social projects this summer as winners of the largest i3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge grant.
Undergraduate innovators put imagination to work
At an event held in Maxwell Dworkin on March 31, the winners of the Harvard College Innovation Challenge (I3), organized by the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), Harvard Student Agencies and the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum, were announced.108 Harvard students, representing 27 different concentrations and all 12 Harvard houses, participated in the annual competition that showcases and rewards innovative student ventures (both commercial and social startups).
Cambridge Friends School Pilot Launches
At first glance, CFS doesn’t look like a school that would deserve an XO laptop pilot program. The school already has a laptop cart filled with PowerMacs, and most of the students have access to computers at home. But a laptop cart at school and computers at home do not constitute a 1-to-1 computing program that results in ownership of a laptop. CFS’s laptop cart made only guest appearances in the classroom and was primarily employed for internet research and word processing, rather than more creative endeavors.
Coolness.Factor++
Many students are interested in web development, whether it is through a non-profit project or a for-profit enterprise. History and Science concentrator Melissa C. Oppenheim ’12 serves as co-president of the Digital Literacy Project or “DigLit,” a web non-profit that promotes computer and internet access around the world. She says that technology non-profits like hers can use web platforms to help low-income communities.
“Over the last 10 years, the internet has become more ubiquitous,” Oppenheim says, adding that the success behind many web and mobile startups is that they are “accessible to large number of people.”
DigLit, which won i3 last year, is also one of several entrepreneurial enterprises that have been supported by the Undergraduate Council, which also endorsed Hack Harvard.
One Laptop per Child comes to Hong Kong
Tin Shui Wai is an unlikely part of the city for two young Americans to visit on their first trip to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Katelyn Foley and MacKenzie Sigalos found themselves dragging a couple of suitcases to the distant community, where local contacts brought them to a nearby kindergarten.
Introduced to a group of about 20 youngsters, Foley greets the class: "Good morning. Is everybody ready?"