computerlab.html

Edubuntu in Mexican Grade School

Computer Lab

students learning in linux lab

We have set up a new computer lab in the Manuel Dublan School in Nuevo Casas Grandes in the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico.
Manuel Dublan is a high quality bi-lingual grade school that teaches Spanish and English.

This year due to financial limitations, this parent-owned private school, had to ask for some volunteers to help with various areas of "extracurricular" activities. One of these areas is the computer lab.

The computer lab consisted of a teachers "server" ( PII 300 ) and 24 student computers (mix of P-75, P100, and PII-266). The computers all were running windows98 , ms office, and various "educational" games.

It was difficult for the previous teacher to keep all the different computers running. Then there were the software issues. Every computer had its own software configuration.

In order to update our computer lab, we calculated about $500 USD per workstation for a total of $12000 USD for a new lab. Then we would need training, networking, etc..

The solution.

Just last year one of the parent/teachers had come across Ubuntu and then Edubuntu. We did a test with some computers at the business of one of the teachers and saw that Edubuntu had some great possibilities for our new lab.

We have setup our new lab now with the following configuration:

Edubuntu 5.10 running on a HP MediaCenter with 3gb RAM, 250 Gb hard drive, and the super sweet AMD dual core athlon x2 4200+.
10 Compaq P3-500 IPAQ desktops we bought off of ebay.
16 other p2-266 - P3-600 computers donated by local families and the Academia Juarez secondary school.

Many of the terminals just worked great right out of the box. A few needed to have some 3com (another ebay purchase) network cards installed. We also bought 12 brand new 17" CRT monitors.

We spent :
$1200 server with memory upgrade.
$1450 12 monitors
$150 cables and such
$250 network switches
$75 lot of network cards
$300 10 ipaq desktop pcs
$1000 epson multimedia projector, screen, cables, etc
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For a grand total of $4425 dollars + countless volunteer hours.

Economically it was a great decision. We are selling our old systems to help offset the cost of setting up our lab. We were only authorized $3000 dollars to set it up.

The projector is connected to a teacher's terminal in the back of the class so that the teacher can watch all students working and project to the screen in front of the class.

Now about the software.

Only one of our teachers had previous linux desktop experience. So it has been a challenge for everyone to take the plunge with a complete change to Open Source software. The teachers are very brave though. They are all becoming experts at openoffice, tuxpaint, firefox, and various other packages. We had to uninstall gcompris, because it is too resource intensive to run on our setup on the 25 terminals. We setup edubunut to run with a smp kernel to use the power of both cores and that makes a huge difference.

LTSP is a dream come true in an educational environment. Now all the computers are running off of one server. When one of the students does something crazy to make their computer crash, we just reset and we are good to go. The students are free to use one computer during one class, and another computer during recess or the next class time, and still have access to their personal documents and desktop settings.

We have Internet functioning through another Ubuntu computer that we use for billing and as a web proxy. We have a white list of sites that the students have access to and the rest of the Internet is blocked.

Now for the future.

We are awaiting the arrival of 20 more IPAQs that we have purchased. We felt that it would be easier to maintain if all the terminals were the same. We are going to locate some of the extra computers in the library on one side of our lab and in the sixth grade class on the other side.

We eventually want to have at least 2 computers in each classroom. One for the teacher to use and one for the students. Some classrooms will have as many as 5 terminals to use. We are planning on teaching our teachers how to use moodle to design some of their coursework.

This summer we will make the switch to the new dapper release of Edubuntu.

Here are pictures of our lab in use:

	we are awaiting the arrival of our projector mount!!	Edubuntu boot on server
some students log in quicker than others	These students love linux and don't seem to miss MS	openoffice on the (teacher controlled) projector screen
	Ye ol' screenshot - looks like we have a network bottleneck. (see both cpus?)

As of Cinco de Mayo 2006, this is where we are. If you have some comments, suggestions, or donations, please contact us at computerlab at manueldublan dot org