I has an OLPC project - join in!

Good news! I have just started an open source software project for the One Laptop Per Child program. It's going to be for student projects here at the uni, but anyone else who wants to can join in. The development laptop is being shipped now and should arrive within a few weeks. The project is abuout storytelling software for young learners.

If you can program and want to volunteer time to write some educational software to help children all over the world, leave a comment on this post to say you are interested. Equally, if you're a teacher who wants to contribute educational expertise let me know. Or indeed, if you are a writer or a storyteller, we'd love it if you could donate some stories.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Storybox - It's empty just now but once students start to sign up, we can fill it in. Here is my proposal which was accepted:

A treasure box of stories

The plan is to develop an application to support children to share

and express their stories with others across the world. It would provide

 brainstorming, planning, composition and review features as well as

some example writing exercises. It would also enable children to

 browse for stories written by other learners, and eventually would

 create a rich archive of stories; a window onto the cultures of the

world. It would draw on aspects previous academic research systems,

 including StoryStation which is an intelligent tutoring system I

 developed a few years back. An interesting feature is that it would  be

based on a model of the creative process of writing, which would

 enable to software to give intelligent prompts to help students with

 the writing process. In future versions there would also be a

 facility to record oral stories (for those who find written language

 difficult, or for cultures where oral transmission is particularly valued). A

 future extension would be to include a comic authoring tool to give

children an opportunity to develop skills in new media literacy.

Comments

[Nicole]

I can't programme, but I let you read the story I'm currently writing for my wee nephews. How's that? They are getting a personalised fairy tale about The Two Clever Princes. ;-)

[Keiron Nicholson]

Not sure I would have the time to properly contribute, but would be interested to see how it develops and might be able to put some time in occasionally.

[John Pirie]

This looks interesting... I'll make this one of my choices I have to give for the research list. I'll send you an e-mail sometime today. :)