Today we went to ‘Good Shepherd School’ to test the learning activities that we had developed for the XO. This was the first time that we got to test our activites with a group of school students. It was a great learning experience for the chidren and for us too.

Apart from the learning activities the children were most interested by the camera on the XO, they were really excited to see themselves on the screen. We feel that it will be more fun and really interesting for the kids when we have more XOs and we can develop learning activities that use the camera and the mesh features.

Thanks to Squeak our software ran without a hitch on each of the four laptops that we had available (Linux, Mac, Windows, OLPC-XO) and it was quick and easy to install on the school’s own computers too.

Special thanks to Bert, Yoshiki, Karl, and the whole OLPC Etoys mailing list for their friendly expert advice!

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Om Prakash Yadav did a fantastic job with our flier for the Game Jam. In a couple days or less I will post the new interface he created for our learning activities. As I told Om, Luke, and Ram today, it is such a pleasure working w/ people more talented than myself. In other news, I spoke with several individuals very keenly interested in developing educational games and graphics. Let’s see what works out. Again, the best thing about OLE Nepal is working with an extremely talented group of people.

We are hoping to have one mini-game jam per month for the next 12 months or so, culminating in a large scale game jam in the next several months. Our goal is to create a community of individuals iteratively involved in creating new activities and improving existing ones.

By the way, our name in Nepali is "Sajha Shikcha E-Paati." It means Union of Learning for E-paati.  E-paati builds upon the Nepali word for a blackboard "Kari-paati." We hope to show that E-Paati’s (laptops) are just as essential to education as blackboards were to the previous generation of learners.

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