One of the main streets in Valle de Ángeles, a village near Tegucigalpa, the capital.

I’ve been lucky this summer to spend 7 weeks in Honduras, working on the OLPC deployment for primary school kids here. I’ve been training the local team (part of Educatrachos, a government- and IADB-funded education project in Honduras): teaching them Python, how to create activities for Sugar, and some Unix server administration magic.

The deployment itself is impressive. Over the past two years, they’ve delivered 40?000 laptops to 400 schools. A lot of the work has been in providing infrastructure (power and internet): this is tricky given Honduras’ hugely irregular terrain. A lot of the schools are using satellite internet, which is inherently affected by the weather. Despite these obstacles, the infrastructure has been in place for a while and is working nicely.

Showing a hint about which cells to sum in Pascal’s triangle.

The focus is now moving towards producing and updating educational resources for the laptops. That means creating new Sugar activities and refreshing and redeploying existing resource collections. This is what the bulk of my time has been spent on: training the team here in how to create activities and collections, starting from basic Python and working upwards. It’s been tricky (because of my poor Spanish if nothing else) but the team have tackled the learning with enthusiasm. I hope to see new Sugar activities on the Educatrachos gitorious page soon! So far, we’ve produced one new Sugar activity: a Pascal’s triangle game. We’ve also published the training materials I used for teaching Python and Sugar. They’re available in English and Spanish, although the Spanish translation is pretty patchy (my fault!).

What remains to be seen is how the project will evolve after the change of government from the upcoming Honduran elections.

Tomorrow is my final day in Tegucigalpa: on Friday I leave for two weeks of time off, travelling around the country to end a fun summer of travelling to celebrate graduating from university after four years.

Thanks to Raúl Segales, Walter Bender, Daniel Drake and Martin Abente for answering my silly questions as I dived into Sugar!