Grit update from Cambodia this month

[Dave O'Brien]

Hey Gritters (hmm, that doesn't sound quite right), hope everyone had a good couple of holiday weekends.

A quick update on the latest with Grit Learning:

- While in Cambodia for GFN 2014, I got a chance to do more testing with young Khmer children at a rural school, who had seen Grit before. Lots of useful feedback. More on that in a separate email.

- The PIO school in Phnom Penh will be running a 3-week trial with Grit in mid-May. We're working with them to determine what is working well, what needs improving, and which features should come next.

- We'll need a minor update to Grit for the PIO trial, mostly involving removing/replacing some of the more problematic math apps. We also ran into a launch bug, but I need to check that with the latest build first.

- Samdy Lonh is now handling Grit in Cambodia. (Rob Esposito had to bow out because his Coco Khmer social enterprise has taken off and now requires (more than) all of his time.) Samdy runs the Google Developer Group in Phnom Penh, and will be our person on the ground there. He's currently looking for a Cambodian developer to help us with translation and code maintenance.

- We now have a Nexus tablet and a lower-resolution tablet to test on, so that should make it easier to move beyond our current Nexus-only limitation.

- The big news is that we're now investigating what it would take to create our own content, in the form of math mini-games that we can plug into Grit. Conceivably, we could encourage developers in both countries to come to hackathons, learn a fun new dev tool like Corona/Gideros/etc., create a simple game from a rough design, and then translate the game to Khmer for use in Grit. It's early days yet, but this would be not only a big improvement to Grit, but also a way to build coding skills in both places. More on this soon!

Thanks!