One laptop for each of 150 million children
http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negroponte/negroponte_netevents.html
“And would somebody like to guess what the first English word of every kid in that picture is? Yes. Exactly. It’s Google. That’s their first English word. ”
At the end of 2007, the worldwide production of [normal] laptops, worldwide, every company that makes something that even approximates a laptop, was 47 million. [For the Laptop Per Child project] we’re talking about 50 to 150 million. […] If you look at the world as a whole, there are, in rough numbers, 1.2 billion children.
But what One Laptop Per Child is, it’s about eliminating poverty. And that’s the reason we do it, that’s why everybody who’s involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education.
When children write computer programs about something like drawing a circle, they have to understand the concept of circleness a lot more than if they just read about it in the text book or somebody describes it on a blackboard. And for those of you who have written computer programs, you know that in fact, the first time you write it, it has bugs. And that when you debug a program, you are actually performing a set of operations that is the closest you can get to thinking about thinking.
Consider it for a moment. Writing a program and then de-bugging it is a very interesting microcosm, that children actually then engage very differently in their own learning.
…
[I]n the first years of our lives, we all learnt how to walk, we all learnt how to talk, in ways that didn’t include teachers. What they included was interacting with the world. You learnt how to walk because standing up got you something. You learnt how to talk because talking allowed you to ask for something. And you interacted with this world around you and you did a great deal of learning.
Suddenly, at about the age of six, you’re told to stop learning that way, and for the next 12 years if you’re lucky, you’ll do all of your learning by being told
…
[I]f you are going to affect education, you cannot just train teachers and build schools. That will take you the next 30 years and it’s a long and slow process. So the only alternative is to leverage the children themselves and that’s what One Laptop Per Child is. It’s how can you give the child an opportunity to have a bigger role in his or her learning.
Most people, this is certainly true in India and China, who want to make a low cost computer, or low cost laptop, take cheap components, cheap labour, cheap design and make a cheap machine. And cheap in the most pejorative sense. It looks cheap, feels cheap, is cheap and often unreliable. What we do is the exact opposite. We take very large scale integration, very large numbers. … The idea is to make it very, very high end, nothing cheap about this laptop. Scale [of millions of laptops] is what makes it happen.
- It takes 600 people to launch 1.2 million laptops in a country
- We provide the server, and guess what the server costs $100 and has 330 Gigs of storage.
- Building your own network is not out of the question. Most [networks are] built by the kids.
- As long as you’ve got 15% or more of the battery, it will in fact be a participant in the mesh network. You’ll be routing other kids’ messages and that’s how the network works, so to speak.
- “if the machine is stolen from the kid, within some number of days […] let’s say five days, it is disabled.”
- China and India together have almost 50% of the children in the world.
- There are about 250 people full time on this project, and about 2000 Linux contributors
(I was dELIGHTED TO HEAR THE LAPTOP HAS NO cAPSLOCK KEY!)
Slides are at http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/HongKong2006/OLPC%20Net%20Events%202006.ppt , summary at http://www.netevents.org/recent-eventsdetail.php?id=10
December 14th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Great post. I just read about the olpc in this months issue of business 2.0. I like the way how you show that the essence of the olpc is not just to google, but to remove poverty and help children in third world countries raise their personal bar.
Why are you glad that there is no caps lock key
December 15th, 2006 at 12:05 am
Most of the wording is from Nicholas’s talk - I quoted the bits I found most interesting.
Capslock… many reasons, but in particular, why is it so easy to hit when all you wanted to shift a single character?
August 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 am
[…] story highlights how the project (which I reported on in 2006) is changing culture, getting kids to be more open and sharing as well as giving them much more […]