education team meeting August, 6
We started discussing the proposal from John Stout (see at the bottom of these notes).
Randy already did two geological projects, he will email them to John and find out if this what John would like to have.
We will talk about the proposal on our board meeting next week.
Tim did show us the new categories for the showcase on the website. Especially for subject we discussed "Authoring and "Media" and decided to remove that from the subjects. The projects, that are currently listed under that description are perfectly suited for tutorials and will be put there. We will discuss subcategories for the main subjects on the mailing list.
Tim told us about his talk with Fabiana Marella and Carlos Rabassa, in preparation for Fabianas talk via internet on Squeakfest.
We will have a newsletter after Squeakfest USA, we wll make a list of potential community spotlights on the wiki and Tim proposed Bettina to write something for the next newsletter.
We will have our next meeting within two weeks at August 20.
---------------------------------------------------------------
John's proposal:
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists met in Denver in June. I contacted representatives from seven African nations at the convention. I proposed this interactive geologic mapping application that could benefit a quarter of a million African children in many aspects of earthsciences. I have selected Nigeria as the prototype Nigeria as it is a significant oil producer plus other minerals.
Recently The Economist magazine observed "The United States wants to get as much as a fourth of its oil imports from Africa within the next decade, to lessen its dependence on Middle East oil."
Interactive geologic maps could give children ages 6-12
a start in geology and the country's potential economics. There are nearly 1800 AAPG members in Africa. There are eight African universities where students are involved in OLPCorps projects this summer. We need to learn about their experience.
I am requesting $25,000 from the AAPG Foundation for developing and training members of the AAPG in the following aspects:
- $4,000 for an AAPG representative, Kunle Adesida of Lagos, Nigeria to attend the October 10-12 summer student debriefing session in Cambridge.
- $2,500 for assembling Nigerian data as the project prototype and building the maps as an interactive model.
- $8,000 for travel and per-diem for an AAPG representative to spend a week develop ing this prototype in Etoys at Viewpoints Research Institute.
- $9,000 to VRI to complete the work as needed to build this interactive Etoys game.
- $1,500 for acquiring incidental materials such as digitized geologic maps for Nigeria
I believe these African children will not only become versed in their country but will develop new ideas such as finding natural resources and better human-computer environments that allow for authoring their own invitations.
Being a resident of Nigeria, Kunle can follow up on these programs through out the summer session of 2010 by employing email and Skype for coordination.
There are GIS programs available for preparation of interactive geologic maps for each African country. We may persuade Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), Redlands CA to make their ARCview application available to this project.
My most pressing questions are:
1) Is my idea feasible? And is $25,000 enough to get a simple prototype done? I need something to show to raise contributions. With the $25,000 from the Foundation I believe I can raise another $75,000 from companies operating in Nigeria. Just getting started is the problem.
2) I know Squeak is designed for children to 'learn learning'
I could use some support on how this particular project would be of benefit to African children. I have asked two recent Colorado School of Mines geology graduates from Nigeria for some surface geology maps of their homeland. There are economic aspects of Africa that local children should learn about their country,
3) Any suggestions how to make this an interactive game to get the children more engaged?