I had the pleasure of meeting with Hartwell Fong yesterday afternoon.  Hartwell is involved with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project developing scientific applications (Activities in XO speak).

Hartwell demonstrated some scientific simulations that he had running on an embedded PC (shown in picture in front of the XO).  The interface to these applications were a set of push buttons.  He seems to truly understand what it will take to design scientific learning tools for children: keep it simple... very simple.

The target audience for the OLPC project are children that have never seen a computer before (in most cases likely haven't seen an kind of teaching aid).

The interface to Hartwell's scientific simulations was simple but the applications themselves were quite impressive.  Calculating fractals and drawing them to screen using only the frame buffer was pretty cool.  There was also a graphical application (using the frame buffer again) that simulated molecules in a gradually compressed cylinder and various collision simulations of balls of various speeds and weights.

If that wasn't enough, Hartwell demonstrated a simple setup in which it was possible to monitor the sun for solar flares.  When comparing his data to that taken from a satellite he did indeed detect a solar flare.

I think that Hartwell's additions to the OLPC project will be warmly received.  He has the scientific background and the technical knowledge to make this little green machine do some incredible things.

I hope to be getting involved with this project helping Hartwell getting his application running on the XO computer.  Technically this will be a challenging project since just about everything I will be using is quite new to me (Linux OS, Linux drivers, Python etc).

It is nice to find a technology project that has such an amazing cause attached to it.  I will continue to update how my adventures with the OLPC goes.