With 8 colleagues in Canada we are currently trying to define the best way to guide the exploration of the possibilities offered by Sugar through interactive tutorials instead of written documentation. We think that it could have a major impact on deployment if we can lower the learning curve this way.

We would surely need your help to develop a better understanding of the way both children and teachers are learning to use the laptop. Right now, here are some questions that we have some problems to figure out:

1. What training is needed (number of hours, subjects covered, number of people involved, costs) to make sure both teachers and children understand the platform enough so that the benefits offered by the laptop outweight the effort spent to introduce it?
2. How do we measure the impact on learning?
3. What parts of the training could be automated by tutorials in a cost effective way?
4. What are the responsabilities assumed by the teachers in a classroom (give exercises, show material, grade exercices, etc.)?
5. Which responsabilities could be assumed by the laptop in a cost effective way by having a kind of “intelligent” tutor on the laptop that would assist children while they are performing activities?

Those questions are by no way exhaustives and we will surely have more in the following months. If you are interested in helping us, we could send you the questions we are asking ourselves as we discover them, it could give a direction to your investigations and would have a tremendous impact on the project.

Thanks a lot!

Erick
P-S: We will put a web site for the project in the next weeks, I could send you the link when it is up and running!

regards,
Rudy

BTW its not easy to move files from one XO to another using the Mesh. The USB method maybe the best available tool right now although I hope its something we can make much easier in a future release. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Objec...

Thanks a lot! I look forward to more reports.

Greg S