User:Joel
Contact
Joel Stanley
Located in Adelaide, Australia (GMT+9:30).
shenki on irc.freenode.net, irc.oftc.net
joel dot stanley at adelaide dot edu dot au
About
My Sugar experience began with a OLPC internship and Summer of Code project in July-September 2007. I worked with smithbone, cjb, mitch, arjs and wad on the XO hardware. I also learnt python thanks to coderanger and mstone, Forth thanks to mitch, and linux c programming thanks to bernie. My work is in git - most of it consists of small standalone scripts, but a notable part was the power measuring work went on to be integrated in cjb's tinderbox.
I have interests in facilitating Sugar deployments locally. Part of this is making both teachers and FOSS people aware of the project, and encouraging them to contribute. There is no lack of energy or enthusiasm for the opportunity that Sugar presents, but there needs to be obvious, open, paths for involvement from any direction.
I spend most of my time studying for my Bachelor of Electrical Engineering in Computer Systems at the University of Adelaide, and working as a software engineer at ASTC (Australian Semiconductor Technology Company).
Projects
Sugar deployment
I've been helping Bill Kerr[1], a teacher at a local school who have been trialling Sugar in the classroom, using Live images on USB keys. The Live-USB method allows them to use a slightly-dated lab full of Dell machines that normally run Windows XP to run Sugar, without having to get the school sysadmin involved.
The class has been using first a 650-based build, and more recently a 0.82 release of Sugar for a semester. They have maintained a wiki[2] on the topic.
Spreading the word
I'm slowly developing my public speaking skills by giving talks to groups - teachers, hackers, uni and highschool students - initially about OLPC, but now about Sugar in it's many forms.
A list of the formal talks I've done, for my own record
- LinuxSA[3], Adelaide, One Laptop per Child, February 2007
- Game makeing cluster[4], Melbourne, ??? 2007
- ForumIT[5], Romania, August 2007
- OSDC 2007[6], Sydney, November 2007
- VITTA 2007[7], Melbourne, November 2007
- LinuxSA LUG[8], Adelaide, Adventures working for OLPC, April 2008
- OLPC Australia Tech Fest[9], Sydney, July 2008
- Woodville Highschool, Adelaide, September 2008
- UniSA[10], Adelaide, Guest lectured for class Exploring the Digital Age, October 2008
Upcoming
- VITTA 2008, Melbourne
- OSDC 2008, Sydney
- LCA 2008, Hobart
Itch
Thanks to Roland Gesthuizen[11], a teacher who I met while giving a talk on OLPC, I came into possession of a Scratch Board - now named Pico Board. It's a small serial based breakout board, with a bunch of sensor inputs. I've hacked together some python to read this data out and display it. This has evolved into an activity for the XO.
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/joel/itch-activity;a=summary
I would like to see this become integrated with Arjun's sensor work in Measure and Turtle Art. Perhaps next would be turning the python into a library suitable for using the sensor data in these programs, and/or Pippy.