An OLPC Intern Experience in Peru

   
   
   
   
   

Jeff Patzer is one of the only 2010 OLPC interns I could find who blogged about their experience. His posts were few, but you can tell the experience was rich, and thankfully, he blogged quite a bit about his experience.

Here is one experience that shows his commitment to children's education in Nov 18 - Last day of OLPC work in the field!:

The teacher wanted to spend a lot of the day doing Grabar, essentially taking pictures and videos, but I am personally not fond of this activity. It is something that does not provide any real educational benefit to the kids (we can argue about this if you want) beyond a cool factor. In fact, most of the activities in the Peruvian XO image are not very useful, simply games, and often times are full of bugs.

For this reason I have developed, along with the help of Hope and Josh, a series of workshops that I believe fully take advantage of the best activities of the laptop, but also optimize educational opportunity. For many schools using the laptops is synonymous with game time. While this is not all bad, the educational aspect is getting completely overlooked. Rather I spent the day creating a game in Scratch with the kids.

Yet, just getting to schools in Peru were a challenge. If you really want to understand how hard it is to reach the OLPC schools in Peru, you need to read Walking and Rain: A day in the life of an OLPC Intern and watch Jeff's video on Yurracancha and the walk to Callanca:

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