In Argentina I got told to ask for the famous “Bife de Chorizo”, a juicy steak served more or less everywhere. I spent three weeks working with Buenos Aires’ Ministry of Education in promoting the lab-in-a-box project and teaching secondary school educators in the use of open source technologies. We developed interesting examples using a combination of Arduino and Processing.

picture courtesy of the Arduino interest group in BsAs

The reaction of the workshop participants to the experience was great, they formed a new technologies interest group that will meet periodically and made some public presentations of the possibilities in teaching using Arduino, as they show in their blog.

The main problem is still importing Arduino boards to Argentina, the import tax is very high for a country which money is worth 25% of the Euro … however if the government is paying, money is not a big deal, and we are talking about 400 schools only in the area of Buenos Aires interested in the use of Arduino. The issue is that the components making an Arduino board what it is are also hard to find there (or non-existing). We need one or more Argentinian distributors as soon as possible!

Other relevant links I could gather during this trip are related to open source software/contents:

– solar.org.ar: one of the open source/free software associations in Argentina

– fmlatribu.com: La Tribu is a radio channel in Buenos Aires that is very concerned about the use of open source and that provides endless hours of copyleft music, both online and on the waves. Also they celebtrated a festival while I was there

– linuxmil.com.ar: the Argentinian military turning to Linux, finally someone taking care of homeland security understands that the penguin offers better level of security than the others