User:Ndoiron/2011-2012 candidacy

Candidacy

To Sugar and OLPC community members:

My interest in Sugar began when I received a G1G1 XO laptop. From my dorm room, I started fixing bugs and then hacking new features for Sugar activities. Since then, I have worked for two months each with the Kasiisi Project in Uganda and Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, and I am presently halfway through another two-month deployment in Haiti. I have helped represent our community at Maker Faire NYC, OpenStreetMap's 2011 conference, and Tech@State. If you have visited http://olpcMAP.net, a website I co-founded, or have read a post from my blogs, http://MapaDelSur.blogspot.com and http://MapUganda.blogspot.com , I hope that it made you feel better connected to the teachers and students using Sugar around the world.

I would appreciate your support for my next phase of volunteering with Sugar: serving on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.

I believe that my experiences teaching Sugar in Uganda and Haiti, and my development work with Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, would help me provide valuable input to the board's decisions. As a 2012 Code for America fellow - http://codeforamerica.org/2011/10/13/meet-code-for-america-2012/ - I will be working closely with city governments to find open-source solutions to common problems. As I see it, Sugar Labs is a major player in the development of open education, but should take further steps to cover traditional math and science disciplines. My recent work on Memorize with Sensors, Mapa Ceibal, and Crikey (a modified Measure activity) are my endeavors to make this possible without losing our engaging constructionist ideals.

Thank you,
Nicholas Doiron
Ecole Shalom ( http://olpcMAP.net?id=966001 )
Croix-des-Bouquets
Haiti

Supporting Info

I want to follow up on requests made for candidates to have plans if elected to the SugarLabs board. To keep it short, I'll write three lists with two items each.

1) Outreach to other education programs

• Mozilla Drumbeat. Connect http://hackasaurus.org and Mozilla's growing education community with our Sugar community.

• Citizen science groups. When I was supporting an OLPC class in Cambridge, Cornell's program was interested but wanted to reach more Sugar users.

2) Supporting science classrooms

• Explain how to build simple sensors for programs such as Flower Bridge ( recently featured on http://blog.laptop.org )

• Write lesson plans for experiments that use only a few materials, such as these: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Ndoiron/SocialCalc also available in Mongolian: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Ndoiron/SocialCalc/Mongolian

3) Encouraging literacy over the web

• Identify English and Spanish reading materials appropriate for school, and make the list prominent on SugarLabs wiki and homepage.

• Suggest materials from NaNoWriMo, get students' work posted on school servers or on a major deployment's website http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/how-does-nanowrimo-work-for-educators

Regards,

Nick Doiron