INTERDISCIPLINARY LEARNING USING LOW COST MOBILE PLATFORMS: PROPOSAL IN GEOMETRY AND ARTS Alexandre Antonino Gonçalves Martinazzo (1) , André Nascimento Mossinato (1) , Rafael Barbolo Lopes (1) , Joyce Alessandra Saul (1) , Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício (1) , Irene Karaguilla Ficheman (1) , Roseli de Deus Lopes (1) Laboratório de Sistemas Integráveis – Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, travessa 3, nº 158 – 05508-970 – São Paulo – SP - Brasil ABSTRACT With the increase in volume and ease of access to information, authoring tools running on mobile platforms take an important role in society. Considering that for each region of the planet people have different needs, the development of any mobile project should cover these variables. Lately, low cost laptops have been developed to attend children in developing countries. These laptops distributed on the 1-to-1 basis create new learning environments, where learners and their teachers use mobile platforms in classrooms, outside classrooms and on field trips. New tools need to be developed to enrich learning experiences. This paper presents the Oficina software, a collaborative drawing activity developed to run on XOs educational laptops produced on large scale and low cost by the non-profitable organization OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). The laptops work in mesh network and are signal repeaters, so if one laptop is very far from the other, but other laptops are in between them, everyone can exchange information. The use of Oficina is within this mobile context so that the student is free to create individually, with friends or with unknown people in a near area. A student can begin drawing alone in his home and continue it during his way to school. There, he can share the drawing with his friends, who can finish it collaboratively, even if the first student who began the drawing is no longer participating. If any student wants to continue the drawing on his own, there is also this possibility. Thus, at the final process of this mobile drawing, there will be variations of the original drawing. One of the innovations in XO laptops that interfere with the user experience when working with Oficina, is the possibility for the student to read the source code of the program and modify it, to make his own version. This is possible because every laptop activity is interpreted in Python, and the proposal is to convert the Python syntax to written native language. So any student will be able to write a program without much effort. We believe that the Oficina software is a powerful tool and can be used to support learning activities in mobile learning environments. KEYWORDS Low-Cost Laptops, Free Software, Drawing Tool, Arts, Geometry, Python. 1. INTRODUCTION New low-cost laptops, like the OLPC’s XO, have appeared in the last two years aiming to provide a new resource for Education. According to Lehner and Nösekabel (2002), mobile learning is “any service or facility that supplies a learner with general electronic information and educational content that aids in the acquisition of knowledge regardless of location and time”. The OLPC's XO introduces the “anytime, anywhere” paradigm, especially in developing countries. Mobile benefits are expected to improve learning results, as well as being a means for students to “learn learning” (OLPC (b); Lehner and Nösekabel, 2002). The Brazilian Government has recently created a project named UCA (Um Computador por Aluno – One Computer per Student), which goal is to distribute a mobile computer for public school students, “as a form of improving education quality and reducing of the digital divide” (Franco et al., 2007). The students attended by the program are those in Basic Education: from 1 st to 8 th grade, normally children between 6 to ISBN: 978-972-8924-54-6 © 2008 IADIS 140