On September 8, Sean Daly and I had the chance to present the association OLPC France and teaching platform free Sugar to an audience of a hundred students of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle ( podcast ).

A big thank you to Mary Coirié who, after living disassembly (and reassembly!) Of the XO / tmp / lab became entranced by this machine and the OLPC project, and has worked hard to prepare this conference. And another thank you to Sean for having mobilized at the last minute and have brought in reinforcements XOs!

I focused the presentation on four "O": the rob o ts o the Leg, the Log o and X O.

The film Robots or the parable of the Do It Yourself

Robots are everywhere: the Golem, Ulysses 31, Jayce and the conquerors, Luke Skywalker and R2-D2, Mitterand and Jacques Attali ... the idea of ​​a "personal robot" existed long before the personal computer . In the worst case, the robots are beyond our control, they become evil and seek to replace humanity as the replicants in Bladerunner. In the best case, they remain in our service, they help us and are so friendly they sometimes help them.

Here's the script Robot: robots disappear because they are gradually decreed obsolete, but a robot is smart and brave resistance by repairing other robots and inventing ad hoc solutions to their problems. The hacker will eventually get his idol, the brilliant inventor Bigweld, to convince him that he must find the taste of craft rather than submit to the orders of an organization that seeks to impose its updates. (Bigweld? Bill Gates?) No need to be Roland Barthes to see a dish featuring the ideas of DIY and open source in general.

Robots are machines for half automata, tools, half man. Become more efficient and above all connected computers look more and more to robots: they automate many tasks more, and we delegate to them increasingly.

The great battle of free software is to enable every man to go really master and owner of these new controllers, and all the open source community to build an ecological technique (a "technosphere"?) In which freedom of man goes through the free exploration and exploitation of machines.

Lego and the principles of OLPC

The principles of OLPC are: the XO must belong to the child, that child may be very young, the more XOs in the environment of children further their presence will have effect, and even more so that the XOs will be connected to each other - finally, the XOs must be open source, both the hardware and software.

Right. And if all this was already true for Lego ? When I look in my memories, I find this: Lego were mine, I played with Lego from an early age I had more Lego more I was able to invent new things. "Connectivity" is also the heart of Lego, or because the goal is just to connect the components together, or because the Lego can be used as support for collective constructions - which is becoming increasingly true with new Lego , the ability to program and to share these programs on the Internet.

An important aspect of Lego: each child process starts with a "top down", he follows instructions from a manual to arrive at the model (which bears his name very appropriate). But gradually, the child plays and frees instructions, he invented Legos, building original, more "bottom-up", so to speak.

Lego is not more towards one or the other approaches, children are free to switch from one to another as they want, while playmobiles, frozen in imitation of the world around us , are just another way of playing with dolls (no offense!)

Logo and constructionism

The Logo is a programming language that has been specifically developed by Papert Seyour as a tool for children and implement the principles of constructionism, themselves inspired by Piaget's constructivism.

Like Lego, Logo was designed to facilitate educational interaction with a computer. The child builds the object will handle it: through chains of command, he traces the figures, organized movements. The environment encourages a reflexive exploration, going back and forth between the definition of movements and their appearance on the screen, back-and-forth that makes the child understands what he does, and tries to beyond that it comprises.

Today, the spiritual descendants of the logo is very rich activities Turtle Art , Scratch and Etoys based on the same pedagogical principles. And these descendants are not only exploratory and reflexive, it is increasingly collaborative: children can partagers Turtle Art objects via XOs, share their Scratch animations (especially via http://scratch.mit.edu), etc. .

OLPC XO and Sugar: the logical

I hope I have convinced you of family resemblances that one
found between these four "O": the XO is a personal robot that allows the child to learn how to get free master and owner of the technology and, through it, from all disciplines that lend themselves to a digital learning .

As said Walter Bender , founder of Sugar Labs : "Freedom is essential to learn the fact, as the act of learning is essential to freedom. "And amid all this, there is you, the community, that takes hold of these free tools, triturated, dismantles them in exploring the nooks, exploits the possibilities. The most exciting is that, for once, adults and children share the same playground!