I had the opportunity to bring an XO computer home from work – it belongs to Jim, one of the software engineers we have working at CORE. Apart from my personal fascination with finally getting my hands on one of these machines to play with, I was keen to see what my youngest kids would do when I let them loose on it. They were (predictably) intrigued, and intuitively began exploring the different things they could do with it. My son became very engaged with eToys, using his experience with Scratch to quickly work out how to programme a simple object to behave in various ways, while my daughter quickly mastered a number of the simple maths and language activities. I was impressed with just how quickly and easily they found their way around the interface and were able to work out how to access the different programmes and dimensions the XO has to offer.
The thing that impressed me the most was how easily the XO could identify and ‘map’ the various wireless access points it found in any particular location in a visual ‘mesh’ network neighbourhood. I simply located our home wireless access point on the mesh, clicked on it and entered the password and “hey presto” – I was connected to the internet! The other thing that had me really impressed was something that isn’t a part of the regular install of and XO – Jim has managed to install a copy of eXe on his XO and get it working! Now that’s impressive.
Like all good things, however, this comes to an end – I’ve had to give it back as Jim travels back to Gisborne tomorrow.
3 replies on “Exploring the XO”
Aha, now I get it – it’s that little toy you were playing with yesterday. Wonder how that compares to the ASUS EEE for functionality – looks pretty cool, shouldn’t we have one each just because…..
Hi Derek this looks great, I am going to Darjeeling in India in July to work voluntearily in a school and hopefully make a connection with them and some schools in New Zealand. I was wondering how I could go about getting these computers or one to take over for them? This is the first time I have done something like this and would be interested in any advice you could give me.
Any chance of getting a bunch of XO’s and EEE’s and trialling them in NZ schools to see which works best and the impact????