Challenges

• Most of the CONAFE schools have no electricity or internet access...so:
• Find out an adequate wind turbine plus backup pedal-power car-batteries charger so that the laptop batteries can be replenished daily; 
• Negotiate cellular internet access
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• The children can read Spanish and understand spoken Spanish but mostly talk and often write in the Tzotzil language; so... 
• Localize a tzotzil-spanish translator
• There is no knowledge of even the existence of computers for most of the children and their families ...
• Some instructors might speak a different indigenous dialect than the children they are teaching
• Community instructors are high school graduates with little training on pedagogy, other than some training provided by CONAFE
• We won't be able to stay in Chiapas for long periods of time. We have to depend on the community instructors to use the technology for constructionist participative activities and to record the experiences on the computer's journal
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• We will need to get approval from the parent's association explaining in simple language why we are doing this. 
• Learning activities will have to be localized to the tzotzil culture
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• While we believe in OLPC's and MacArthur's visions on learning in the 21st. century, we don't quite know how to get from here to there... therefore, we will have to achieve a clever and difficult balance between:
•  integrating our activities with the existing curriculum, instructional methods and assessment so that the project is accepted and easily integrated with current practice; and, however... 
• inducing the children towards innovating these activities or creating new ones; construct new artifacts, share them with their peers, reflect on their learnings & register these on their Journal; collaborate in peer-production and review... Or rather: inducing the instructors towards inducing the children towards... 
• OLPC computers are difficult to get except in very large quantities
• (more to come, likely....)  

Facilitating factors

• The CONAFE curriculum already is constructivist and each child is given a paper exercise book with plenty of constructivist and constructionist, collaborative activities --however, some instructors do not follow the book and have a tendency towards instructionism. 
• CONAFE classrooms are multi-grade
• CONAFE community instructors are indigenous, young, high school students eager to use technology. We suspect they might like a different and technology-based approach to have the children learn independently
• One of us (Yolanda) already has experience doing educational research and developing activities for little children -from rich urban kids to poor indigenous children in Chiapas and other states of Mexico. Some of these activities have used computers. 
• Another of us (Jose) has experience in developing constructionist learning environments at the graduate level and with the Squeak and Python languages used in the OLPC
• Yolanda and our university have very good connections with CONAFE, Intel and internet cellular companies.
• Both of us have experience with Problem-based learning, constructivism and constructionism, though mostly at the university level.
• There will be several students of ITESM's Master in Educational Technology which will develop thesis around this project.