Greetings on Our Way to Cameroon

Since this is our first post it would seem fitting that we introduce ourselves. We are Siler, Sam, and Brittney, three rising juniors at the University of Pennsylvania who are doing a project in Cameroon this summer with One Laptop Per Child. We got this opportunity through applying for a competitive grant through One Laptop Per Child's new AfricaCorps Intiative: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCorps_Africa based on a proposal that Sam and I put together this spring: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_of_Pennsylvania_OLPC

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization started by students at MIT with the goal of providing a low cost, rugged laptop to the children in the developing world, in order to use these incredible machines as a tool for teaching young children how to think for themselves and create knowledge and build skills that will open up a new world of possibilities for them. (See Constructionist Learning/constructionism for more on the educational philosophy that OLPC subscribes to)

The goal of our project is to work with OLPC to bring 100 of their XO Laptops to a village in the southwest province of Cameroon and implement an educational program based on these learning principles. To do this we are partnering with a local NGO called the United Action for Children http://www.unitedactionforchildren.org/, an NGO founded in 1996 with the mission of providing access to quality education to the underprivileged youth of this area. The UAC runs an alternative school called the Jamadianle School outside of the town of Buea and this school will serve as our major base of operations.

Among the numerous challenges that we will face will be how to provide power to our 100 XO laptops at the school which has limited power input and sometimes unstable electricity, how to transfer an internet connection found at the UAC's IT center 10km distant to the school and then broadcast it to the laptops so they can access the vast resources of the web and network,how to come up with interesting yet purposeful learning projects that use the XO to further the development of the students at the school, and how to ensure the sustainability of our project after we have gone (We will be there until August 15th).

Over the next few weeks we plan to face and overcome there and many more challenges in the pursuit of one amazing, productive, and exciting summer where a large serving of learning will be doled out all around.
As I write this we are in London at Sam's aunt's house, preparing for the second leg of our journey which should bring us into Douala, Cameroon tomorrow evening.

Until then, Cheers from the UK
Team Developing Brighter Futures (DBF)