Month: December 2009

Wende School Project – Part 5 (Localized TuxTyping)

Posted on by Pockey Lam

We have been looking for a Free and Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu  was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010.

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody.  The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin!
TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.
There are four different kinds of typing games for kids to practise typing.
There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.
This is "Feeding Tux with fish"
Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!
There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation

An event helping the Migrant Workers Families

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As a volunteer of the Greenboard Free and Open Teaching project, I was invited to join the charity event hosted by Friends of New Citizens and 10 other NGOs on December 13 Sunday. The event objectives were mainly to:

  1. give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
  2. give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
  3. enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
  4. panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions 🙂 Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

Helping the migrant workers and children
Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China
RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 Migrant Workers' families
RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families
Best Teachers Awards were given to 99 selected teachers at Migrant Schools
Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools

Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!
Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!
A few folk songs given by Chinese famous singer
A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer
During the event, there are a few Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media
Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day  working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

Everybody hack on their own project there
Everybody hack on their own project there
Here is a group hacking on the Linux kernel
Hacking on the Linux kernel
Quadcopter Open hardware project
One of the projects is “Quadcopter Open hardware project”
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun
All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group
Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org community member
Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!
First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!

Wende School Project – Part 4

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to Wende School to see how things were going.  With the help of Julien and Jason, they already incorporated computer classes into their existing curriculum, once a week for grade 3 to grade 6 (grade 1 and 2 should have it soon) teaching children how to use the keyboard and mouse with Gcompris and giving Art classes with Kolourpaint. Miss Liu already scheduled each grade classes until the end of the school year. When we arrived grade 5 was actually using the computer lab, it was so cool! At the end of the class, we discussed again with Miss Liu and gathered more comments.

The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:

  1. Concepts of Computer, FOSS and Open Education in education (10 mins)
  2. Hardware and Operating System introduction (30 mins)
  3. Apps to teach English (30 mins)
  4. Italc classroom management system (30 mins)
  5. Q&A (20 mins)

The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves).

This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!

Computer class of Gcompris and Kolourpaint, not demo any longer!
A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!
Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris
Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris
Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training
Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training
Italc Classroom Management System Training
Italc Classroom Management System Training
Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program
Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program
Happy kids in Wende School!
Happy kids in Wende School!