Scratch in Low Bandwidth Environments

Hi All,

Unfortunately for us here in Afghanistan one of the normal desirable features to have for Scratching, a reasonable Internet connection for using scratch.mit.edu etc. isn't really accessible.  So thought I would share what we're doing here about it and see if anyone else around here has had similar experience.

For our implementation of OLPC I have made an offline library system so that the library works over the school LAN.

I have just written a scratch downloader program in Java that given the ID of a gallery will download all the projects in that Gallery, their thumbnail, and description.  Works pretty nice so far - downloaded over a thousand scratch programs to our external server in Germany in around 2 hrs, and can then download them overnight to Afghanistan.  I can then make that work with the Nutch search engine so that we can then search through the contents.

I'm just digging into exelearning (www.exelearning.org) at the moment which is quite a nice framework for making curriculum e-learning material and I'm developing in Python an iDevice for this to make it easier to add Scratch projects to enhance curriculum materials.

I'm also wondering about how we are going to share the localization work that we do on the projects that demonstrate the curriculum content.  Possibly we could upload the project as a remix and we could write a program to automatically do this in batch overnight.

Regards,

-Mike