Gian Pablo Villamil

Clay has posted on article over at BoingBoing on a test that can predict whether people will be able to learn programming or not. It’s been observed for many years, and I can attest from personal experience, that there are people who can learn computer programming, and people who can’t. Any amount of instruction won’t change this.

Having just finished ITP, this immediately struck a chord. ITP projects are at the intersection of art and technology, and often require a high degree of technical skill to make them work. Some people don’t have the technical skill, and end up collaborating with someone who does. Moreover, there seemed to be a basic question of aptitude: some people “get” coding and electronics (even without previous instruction), and others don’t, and I never saw someone from the latter group join the former.

The lack of coding ability seems to create immense amounts of stress, and often drives the success or failure of complex projects. The research cited in the article suggests that there is little to be done about this: you simply can’t teach the mental habits.

This finding has interesting implications for a number of projects. For example, the OLPC project seems heavily skewed towards teaching programming (it includes no less than 3 different programming environments – Python, Smalltalk and Logo – but nothing like a typing tutor).

The title of Clay’s article, about being comfortable with meaninglessness, also has another interesting implication. This is purely anecdotal, but I have noticed that people who are good at programming, who are “comfortable with meaninglessness”, tend to have very positive reactions to some types of pyschedelic experience. Perhaps this is because they are better able to let go of a “common sense” model of the world, and accept another with its own rules?

Note: the title of my post is a joke, which will probably sort readers into the two groups.

December 12th, 2008 | Category: Commentary, OLPC, Technology | Leave a comment

I’ve had the OLPC XO laptop now for several months, and feel I understand it well enough to comment further on it. I’ve spent a lot of time working with it, and feel that it is working as well as an OLPC XO is ever going to work. I’m using a development build of the software, with power management enabled. It reliably dual-boots into XFCE or Sugar, and I’ve installed the applications that I need. On the Sugar side, I’ve made a number of small adjustments, and it does run reliably (it does what it is supposed to, most of the time).

Getting familiar with the OLPC has had its ups and downs. I set out to write a careful, balanced assessment of the device, its software, and the overall program. I thought that it made sense to look at the OLPC from the perspective of an adult user looking for a lightweight computer, vs. a child in a difficult environment looking for an educational device. However, the more I looked into it, the angrier I became about some of the design decisions that have shaped the OLPC, in ways that cripple it for adults and children alike. My conclusions in a nutshell:

• The hardware is great: It is really well-designed and fit for purpose. Not really used to its full potential yet.
• The Sugar user interface is terrible: It is poorly executed (but that is just a timing issue), but worse, it is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions about children, and the way the OLPC will be used. These wrong assumptions are:
  • Children need to have a massively simplified user interface
  • Software needs to be simplified in order to run on limited hardware
  • For most children using the OLPC, this will be the only computer they have access to
• The program has weaknesses baked in: in the way development is run, in the way institutional relations are addressed and others.

Don’t get me wrong: I support the goal of the program. Getting computers into the hands of millions of children, following an educational model that emphasizes exploration and self-direction is a good thing. I am not of the camp that argues that clean water, food, shelter should be emphasized instead. (Those things are crucial – however, insisting that they have to be provided before any educational programs are launched is a mistake.)

However, I think that stubbornness, ideology and arrogance have so influenced the program that it may suffer badly in consequence.

It is possible to save the OLPC program. I think the path to doing this would mean changing the direction of software development to better link with the existing Open Source/Linux movement, and making the OLPC far more inter-operable with the rest of the computing world.

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March 15th, 2008 | Category: Commentary, OLPC | Comments (2)

At NYU’s ITP program, the Processing and Arduino programming environments are widely used. Since my main interest in the OLPC is to use it as a controller for projects, and since most of my projects are built using those two tools, I was very interested in getting them running on the OLPC.

In addition, both Processing and Arduino are projects that have a lot in common with the OLPC project: they are focused on education, focus on making computing technology available to groups that previously would have found it difficult, are fully Open Sourced, and rely on a community-based approach to support and development.

Good news: it is strikingly easy (with caveats). The Arduino IDE runs under Sugar (the OLPC’s built-in user interface) and under XFCE (a more conventional Linux window manager). Processing runs fine (albeit slowly) under XFCE. However, it gets confused under Sugar, which doesn’t handle multiple windows well.

Read past the break for instructions!

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February 24th, 2008 | Category: How-To, OLPC | Comments (5)

I’ve moved the information in this post to a dedicated page here.

February 1st, 2008 | Category: How-To, OLPC | Comments (1)