Collaborative Development for the XO-1 laptop (CODEX)

Collaborative Development for the XO laptop (CODEX)

The primary objective of CODEX is carry out research in support of the Level 2 Group Projects found on all courses for students in the Department of Computing and Informatics (DCI) so that all Level 2 student project groups can undertake projects developing applications suitable for the XO laptop – the principal system at the heart of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and to produce a tutorial for students on the XO software providing guidance for the development of XO applications by the various group projects which are related to student's degree course within DCI.

The OLPC project is seeking to engage children globally in this enterprise of “learning to learn” by equipping them with networked laptops. The XO laptop has explicit support for collaboration and sharing of activities through its SUGAR user interface and mesh view which focuses on the activities of its networked users making real things directly supporting the evolution of knowledge as a collaborative enterprise. Education is necessarily a collaborative enterprise with a need for both repositories and also active support for the educational processes as learners engage with one another and their teachers. There is scope for our group project students to develop applications for the XO and make a significant contribution.

All the software associated with the XO is built upon Open Source Software (OSS) and there are already projects within the OSS community to develop further applications for the XO. So in the initial research, the student can survey these and evaluate the current tools being used in these projects as well as investigate the current application program interfaces (APIs) of the software currently available for the XO. The Centre for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) directed by Professor Boldyreff has already begun some preliminary research into the software potential of the XO and last summer an undergraduate student worked within CROSS to research and develop a student focused version of the popular Open Source development environment, Eclipse, as part of Eclamp (Eclipse Amplified) UROS project which may prove a suitable basis for application development by student project groups for the XO.

In brief, the project is envisaged to involve three main phases:

1. Investigative phase: background research on OLPC, study of XO software base and its existing applications, survey of existing XO application development tools and current XO software development projects, investigate the feasibility of adapting or further amplifying Eclamp to form the basis for development environment for XO student group projects.
2. Development phase: determine a suitable development environment for XO application development by student groups, possibly based on Eclamp or other available Open Source Software available from the OLPC project and develop an installable version of this development environment for student group use.
3. Trial usage and evaluation phase: develop a range of simple applications using the deliverable of phase 2, i.e. the development environment, and produce a tutorial guide for group project students.

This research follows the classic form of research related to Software Engineering; it involves domain analysis (the OLPC investigations), study of relevant technology (XO software and current applications and their APIs), study of supporting methods and tools for collaborative software development (existing OSS projects related to XO applications, their use of methods and tools), followed by the development of an appropriate environment for student group projects and its evaluation through trial usage leading to the production of the tutorial guide for future students.

The student will require skills in researching technical literature as well as related educational material relating to the OLPC project and its applications. Technical skills will be required for the research into development environments and the related development work identified above and for the production of the tutorial. All of the research and development outlined here will be built on existing work, but the student will have the opportunity to become part of a much larger enterprise by contributing back to the open source community all the deliverables as an open source project hosted on SourceForge. As in the Eclamp project, the student researcher will work as member of the CROSS along side other academic staff and research students throughout the summer. It is envisaged the student would divide their time equal between the three phases outlined above spending approximately 3 weeks on each phase and a final week, developing a poster report on their project.

Although the project will formally be completed by the end of the Summer 2008, there is the possibility of carrying forward this research into the student researcher's final year project throughout the academic year of 2008-09 and of the student and supervisor attending the UK's first student research conference in Computer Science on December 2008. Computer Science 2008: student research conference, is the first of its kind to be organised in the UK. This is a research conference aimed at students with briefings on the Grand Challenges in Computer Science research. Attendance will enable the student researcher to set their own research project in a much wider context and appreciate the collaborative element inherent in so much of Computer Science research.