Introduction: How to Contribute Educational Content to the OLPC $100 Laptop

By www.instructables.com
About: Eric J. Wilhelm is the founder of Instructables. He has a Ph.D. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. Eric believes in making technology accessible through understanding, and strives to inspire others to learn …

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association is looking for educational content to place on the laptops and in regional/country repositories. Instructables is a great format for content, so we're inviting all of you to contribute your great Instructables for consideration to be included.

Step 1: Create a Great Instructable

Good ideas include projects that can be made with materials available in the developing world (generic materials wherever possible), are suitable for ages 6-15, and are useful as well as good fun or demonstrate a broadly useful technique. A large number of Instructables already fit these criteria.

OLPC has a wiki with a discussion of the content they would like to see.

They plan to judge the content by the breadth of its educational value across age ranges and cultural context, by the freeness of its license, by its size (smaller is better), and by the ease of translation (related to cultural context, language difficulty, and the elegance of any images).

Step 2: Set As Free a License As You Can

All freely licensed (CC-BY-SA, Attribution, or Public Domain) educational content is eligible for inclusion on the laptops directly. Non-commercial (CC-SA-NC) content is eligible for inclusion in the larger regional/country repositories. If you're not familiar with the licenses, you can read more about them here.

Change the license of your Instructable by clicking on the "Change license" link while in the edit menu.

Step 3: Add Your Instructables to the OLPC Educational Group

Add your Instructables to the OLPC Educational content group.

To do this, you first need to be a member of the group. Under the Explore heading, click Groups, find the OLPC group, and click on it. Or, just click here. Once on the group, click the join button. Now, you can add any of your Instructables to the group by clicking the "Add this instructable to a group" link on the left sidebar when viewing the Instructable.

OLPC plans to do a top tier content review in September, so make sure to get your Instructables in the group by September 10th.