Work in progress — Rochester Institute of Technology, One Laptop Per Child and Open Source; a unique approach to service education

In January 2009, the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Lab for Technological Literacy (LTL) and Department of Interactive Games and Media (IGM) offered a seminar around the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Sugar educational platforms. The goals of the seminar were to create games and teaching materials to support 4th grade math curricula while teaching the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development tools and processes. Over the three sessions that the seminar was offered, the beginnings of a complete educational ecology began to emerge. Students who had completed the course came back on their own-time to mentor new students and encourage them to continue work on the projects that had emerged in a previous course session. This paper will examine the course content, the factors that came together to form this emerging ecology and the next steps needed to formalize it within the institution.