Gardner Pilot Academy

Boston Public Schools - Allston http://www.rabbitnet.net/gpa/

GPA is partnering with Solution Grove and Sugar Labs to pilot Sugar on a Stick.

The Gardner Pilot Academy is the flagship full-service community school within the Boston Public Schools (BPS). The school's vision is to educate the minds and develop the characters of all students in partnership with families and community. To achieve this GPA provides high quality teaching along with a range of social, emotional and enrichment programs delivered by means of partnerships with an array of community organizations and individuals. Over the past twelve years, GPA has developed strong associations with four universities, several health and mental health agencies, the YMCA, and various organizations teaching visual and performing arts. As one of just 20 pilot schools in the BPS, GPA is exempt from district mandates. Therefore, GPA has autonomy in the areas of budget and personnel, along with the freedom to implement innovative curricula, assessments, and interventions.

Located in a culturally and linguistically varied section of Boston, the GPA serves quite a diverse student population. GPA's 336 students and their families speak more than 13 languages ranging from Spanish to Khmer (all of which are supported by Sugar). Demographically, 15.2% are African American, 59.1% are Hispanic, 10.7% are White and 13.1% are Asian. Over 85% of the students meet the federal poverty guidelines for participation in the Free or Reduced Price Lunch Program. The majority of GPA's students fall within a group of students considered to be academically at risk.

GPA is located only a few blocks from Harvard Business School and so is convenient for project development participants who may be students at one of Boston’s many universities.

The school currently has a single computer lab with older computers running Windows 2000. We will be soliciting donations of used equipment from local business to supplement these existing resources. Sugar can be used at all elementary levels and curriculum areas.

Currently computers at GPA

A computer lab with about 20 EVO D500 Pentium 4 computers running Windows 2000
20 new Apple laptops in a mobile cart (OSX, hardware details unknown, no Parallels)
Each teacher has a MacBook with Parallels 3.0

There are two teachers in the school especially interested in starting with Sugar

4th Grade teacher wants to do portfolios
Science Teacher wants to pilot with the 5th grade to support a new district mandate for writing in Science.

Looking for Summer Volunteers and Work-Study Students

We are currently looking for committed volunteers and work-study students for the Summer. We have some funding for Work Study so if you know any eligible students please let us know.

Ideally we would like a team of 3 people, each working around 20 hours per week. A technical person, a person with education experience and a marketing person.

Project Goals

For the GPA School:

Student Learning,
Teacher Participation,
Parent Perception and
Greater GPA School community perception of the project.

Our goals for the Sugar Project are:

Sugar on a Stick projects are replicated at other schools
Improving Sugar for everyone, including OLPC XO children
Increasing the visibility of Sugar
Knowledge and best practices for using Sugar in US Schools

Status for the Computer Lab

Sugar on a Stick boots with the F9.9 Boot Helper CD!

However it does not see the network card and thus there is no internet connection. F11 boots and does see the network card. We didn't get to test that it actually connected to the internet.

Critical Path Technical Issues

[Ticket 598]. We are having what are probably driver issues with both old EVO-D500 computers (network) and the Macs (Video Card Support). In this particular situation we can install software on the school computers. Thus a promising solution is a Virtual Machine (probably VirtualBox) solution that will allow students to put in their USBs Sticks and use all the personal data from the Sticks so they can use any computer.
[Ticket 579]. We have several donated computers. A requirement for the donations was that we wiped the harddrives. Thus we also need an installable operating system that is basically just a "boot-helper" and again all student data is on the USB.

Can't get Computer Lab Machines to Boot from USB - The BIOS says it should be trying to boot from the USB but its not looking at the USB. A google search confirms that this is not a sugar problem, its a EVO D500 problem. I'm hoping we find a solution. http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/599

Google Search on EVO D500 usb boot gives this result: http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1237587827991+28353475&threadId=1038476

Enhancement Tickets

The following tickets would be helpful for this deployment.

Tux Paint for the younger kids to play with this summer. - 886 and 887
An installable Boot Helper. When people donate computers that have hard-drives, but they want the hard drive wiped,we should install on the hard-drive a boot environment that always looks for a USB - 579
A boot helper on a floppy disk. Its a real pain to use CD boot-helpers. You have to turn on the computer, eject the CD, put in the boot-helper, restart the computer and repeat the process when you turn it off. It would be much easier to have a floppy disk that we could just leave with the computer. No one uses the Floppy anymore so it could just sit in the computer and people could push it in when they wanted to boot into Sugar. 597

The computer lab computers claim to be able to boot from USB but aren't. We are trying to figure out why in Ticket 599.
Boot Helper Floppy - This is easier then a CD because the computer has to be turned on to open the CD Drawer and put in the CD then you have to turn it off again and reboot.http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/597