Project Update: Nandblasting + Teacher Training

With the help of SAFY, our Ugandan NGO, we managed to get in touch with the local government. Our meeting with the Mayor of Kampala City Central division (K.C.C.) and the Inspector of Schools went pretty well. We managed to obtain their support and cooperation in helping us continue our deployment for the summer. It was tough, because KCC wanted to distribute our laptops to several schools and “spread the wealth.”

Rose, Inspector of Schools in KCC; Kristen Watkins; Jeff Xing; Godfrey Nyakana, Mayor Kampala Central Municipal Council; Victoria Cheng; Mariam, Chair Education KCC; Secretary KCC

We successfully received our shipment of 100 XO laptops and needed to update all the firmware & Operating System on each. Rita Nangono, the director of SAFY, graciously let us unpack them and reflash the laptops at her house. We spent a good 3 hours or so using two usb flash drives to reflash everything. One usb was plugged into one of our XO’s and was used to broadcast the image file wirelessly to all the other XOs. The other usb was used to update the firmware on each, before it can receive the image file wirelessly. Below are the picture of this process.

Victoria & Kristen unpacking the 100 XO laptops

Jeff reflashing the firmware on each XO

Kristen stacking the packaging materials.

Victoria playing with Matthew, the son of our NGO's director, Rita Nangono

Jeff teaching Matthew how to use the XO

XO's waitinng to be reflashed & nandblasted

34 passes before we finished! (bottleneck, because we only had 2 usb)

The following week, we began teacher training at Kampala Primary School. Paul Commons and Lynn Wang (OLPC staff) stopped by to see our deployment. Our school, as it turns out, had limited electricity so we had to first survey the site with an electrician to get a quote on new wiring costs to support the influx of so many XOs.

Unfortunately, the electrician gave us inflated prices (probably because we are “mizungu”—the local term for “white people”), and now we have to wait for another one to figure out the right prices. Since we can’t deploy the laptops to the kids until the electricity infrastructure is installed, we simply proceeded to train the teachers of the two grades we are deploying to: P5 and P6. There are 3-4 teachers total and we spent each day teaching them basic computer skills.

Kampala Primary School

KPS - about 200 students (P1 - P7)

Paul Commons teaching headmaster Zaiyed

Miguel Martin talking about OLPC to Math teacher, Saul

Jeff fixing the wall socket - hooray, leatherman!!

(somebody had wired the live red wire to where the ground wire should be)

Makeshift Blueprint of Wiring Plans for the 2 class rooms

Makeshift Blueprint for the socket layout in one room

Victoria guiding two teachers, Zaiyed and Robinah

Math teacher, Saul, teaching the another teacher, Aminah.

Official Handover of XO's to Teachers.

-Jeff