To mark the worldwide celebration of Free Software used in Education and Free Educational Resources: Education Freedom Day 2015 and Open Education Week 2015, we hosted one small informal discussion session with Rob Grande (Representative of LOOMA Project) on the date, 17th March 2015. A discussion session was hosted at FOSS e-Solution which is situated at Putalisadak, Kathmandu. During discussion session we talked lot’s about LOOMA project and others project of VillageTech Solution. We also discussion different ways of collaboration on the field of Open Education in-between VillageTech Solution and Open Knowledge Nepal.

LOOMA is a portable projection system, which is affordable and low power consuming audio-visual technology device, which provide an interactive window to the internet and access to educational content to village schools that have never seen electricity, computers, or in some cases, even books. Looma uses a wand to navigate the screen, like an electronic whiteboard. The system runs on deep-cycle 12 volt batteries that are re-charged using solar power and is about the size of a shoebox.

Till now LOOMA is getting support from VillageTech Solution but now VTS is also currently seeking financial partners to join the Looma team and help put this powerful tool into the hands of students and teachers worldwide.

Is LOOMA Open Source? Question of Subham Ghimire (Member Open Knowledge Nepal): Rob says “Till now LOOMA is still in development phases and still we are trying to make many changes, therefore we haven’t made code public but I will take us more than Two weeks and all the code will be made available publicly”.

During discussion Rob suggest Open Knowledge Nepal Team can help LOOMA project by organizing different Hackathon for LOOMA project or by providing educational content of Nepal so, that they can integrate those content at LOOMA. He also define a little bit about hardware structure of LOOMA, how projector are made.

Some cool features of LOOMA are:

• Interactive whiteboard capability
• Internet connection over any mobile data network and Wi-Fi
• Online and offline educational content
• Web browser
• Local storage capability

You can check more about LOOMA and others project of Village Tech Solution from their Website: http://villagetechsolutions.org/

and Check LOOMA Intro Video: https://vimeo.com/99206742