We embarked on and completed a number of learning projects during our deployment, the majority of which were geared toward introducing or increasing the knowledge of specific programs or skills and they were set up so that each learning project built on the skills gained from the previous lesson as well as always leaving room for the students own creative voice to be heard. The learning projects that we began with differed according to the age level of the class, for the younger classes we started with basic lessons on using the keyboard, mouse, and other features of the XO. For Holiday classes 5 and 6 the students were asked to practice writing sentences in Write about their class, taking care to use proper punctuation and spelling. For Holiday classes 3 and 4 the lessons began as basic as moving the mouse pointer in a circle around the home screen and then typing the letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case in Write. These classes gradually moved toward exploring other activities such as Record and Paint, and here they started with simply drawing a flower or a house, or taking a picture of themselves and moved on to changing the colors of their painted objects and importing pictures into Write so that they could be described. The majority of learning projects occurred within our morning XO specific classes where we taught the 100 students who had signed up to be a part of our summer program. These classes were divided into two age groups, 7-10 and 11-13. I will describe what learning projects we progressed through in the older class as this class moved into completing learning projects 1st and generally the younger class followed with similar learning projects, just at a slower pace. One of the first projects asked the students to come up with their own superhero that would possess a certain superpower they would like to have themselves. The students first drew their superhero in Paint and then imported the image into Write where they wrote the background history about their superhero's life and how he or she gained their superpowers. Day 2 of this learning project had the students picking a heading in the offline Wikipedia that would most likely encompass the superpowers they had written about. They then skimmed the articles for a suitable definition and copy and pasted this from Wikipedia into their Superhero Profile under a section called "Facts".This was meant to show the connection between the fantastic powers they came up with and the foundation these powers had in science and nature as well as give them the skills of copy and pasting between different programs. A few following learning projects involved taking a picture of themselves, pasting it into Paint, making it the center of the page and them using various tools to draw lines out from their pictures to create a family tree where they used the text tool to type the names of their different family members in relation to each other on the tree. They were then encouraged to decorate their diagrams like real trees by adding color and leaves around the names they had typed. Another project involved the creation of a Memorize game that compared words and phrases in the Pidgin dialect the majority of the students spoke amongst themselves and at home to phrases in standard English that they were required to speak in school. This was meant to demonstrate the potential of Memorize and demonstrate similarities in phrasing, but also to delineate a clear demarcation between the two (somewhat) similar languages that acknowledged an appropriate context for each. One of the next major learning projects we did involved a more advanced use of Write as well as a transition into the use of more complex programs such as Scratch. In this project I chose animal sprites from the Scratch Activity and listed them on the board alongside a list of themes in literature. We spent the first half of class discussing the components of a story (plot, characters, theme, setting, conclusion etc.) after which the students were asked to come up with a story of their own, choosing several of the animals from the list and one of the themes. They were asked to have a creative title as well as distinct paragraphs for setting, plot and conclusion that demonstrated their understanding of how a story was typically formatted. After working on their stories they were encouraged to illustrate them either by drawing pictures themselves in Paint or taking pictures around the school that would fit in. The next day we had an introduction to Scratch that involved us acting out the action from an example story and working with a giant Scratch screen drawn on the board, after which the students were asked to bring a scene of their story to life using Scratch. Among the several other learning projects we completed there are two other larger ones I will mention. The first began with a discussion of vocabulary related to the idea of business and commerce. Students defined terms such as product, company, advertisement, goods and services. Afterwards they were told to come up with their own product to market. They were to draw their product in Paint and then answer several questions about it such as what it was made of, who would buy it and what it was used for. The next day the assignment was to create an advertisement for their product using either Paint, Record, or Scratch in an attempt to convince others to buy what they had created. The intention after this (though we didn't get a chance to implement it) was to show the advertisements and have students with similar products combine to form Companies, they would then come up with a business plan of operations and we would have a "classroom marketplace" where they would all attempt to sell their products and the company that made the most profit would win. The second project began with a discussion of what was special about their country. The students then looked at the Tourism web sites for other countries and discussed what the purpose of tourism was and how other countries tried to encourage it. We then talked about the problems that they saw in their own country and what things they would change if they were the leaders of their own country. They were then assigned to write about their own "perfect country" and to pick several of the headings from Wikipedia about other countries (economy, geography, climate, language, government) to fill in for their own countries. They then made tourism brochures in Paint about their countries so that others would come and visit. In addition to these and other learning activities something we did with the students as a review of the skills they had been learning was to create contests where they took down a list of actions that had to take in a certain order that included things like taking a picture and labeling it or making a scratch presentation with certain criteria and the first students to successfully complete everything on the list received a prize.
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