One Laptop Per Child

Situation

Western kids sit on sofas watching cartoons about destruction on 42" televisions. Education is often taken for granted and their expectation is that society will look after them. It does this by building tanks and GPS guided missiles, spending most of its money on defence. In poorer parts of the world children are hungry or suffering from diseases that could easily have been prevented for the want of a little education. Many don't even have electricity or the ability to share ideas and successes about how to create a better world.

Problem

How sustainable is a human race that rushes ahead in one part of the world developing high tech and luxury living with hollywood movies exaggerating and provoking people to ever greater excesses and the primary feeling towards other parts of the world being one of fear when other parts of the world struggle with basics like sanitation and agriculture, let alone even having basic infrastructure like electricity or computers to enable sharing of ideas and collaboration in education for solving community problems?

Implication

Whilst the potential for greatness and achievement are squandered by those that are privileged, fear ironically seeming to be proportional to wealth, and depression taking over where a lackadaisical attitude reveals no challenges in life, others are deprived of even the basics of education and whilst seeming incredibly happy and hopeful in many cases by comparison, they are severely disadvantaged and removed from being able to contribute to that greater achievement we could all be sharing in. The ability to contribute to a sustainable global human social dynamic is being denied almost every young person despite the well accepted fact that it is the children, the next generation of thinkers, that will be the ones that will create change. Ability to create positive change is massively impacted by conditioning and awareness of the broader situation and its implications. A globally shared awareness is key to creating a sustainable humanity.

Need

Fundamental educational needs are failing to be met. In the richer parts of the world a woeful lack of awareness and laziness created by a bratitude born of ignorance stifles imagination and creativity whilst in poorer locations basic education relating to health and agriculture must be improved. Whilst the specific areas of education differ (from awareness of the wider world and how different your position is to others, to basic knowledge about disease and agriculture), there is a common need for inspiration and excitement in education. Only when children are able to see the nature of the world in which they live and understand the potential roles they could play in that can they really experience life "in the real world" and come to conclusions about who they want to become and how they will make their life worthwhile. Anyone put in such a position would feel gratitude and want to share the same privileges with others.

Solution

There are many ongoing activities in the world chipping away at different parts of this challenge. The one we are going to talk about here is a charity called One Laptop Per Child. Their aim is to put a laptop in the hands of all children all over the world. They have over 1.5 million laptops already deployed to various countries including Peru, Uganda, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and many others.

The XO laptops suitable for use anywhere, where there may be little or no electricity and where the environment may be too harsh for a normal laptop to operate reliably have been created to run from solar power

They have a wiki for collaboration in deploying these laptops and providing electricity and internet connectivity; a significant challenge in such wildly differing environments. Here is a world map of deployments. Its an impressive achievement. There are also projects running in the UK and North America.

An open software environment that can be developed by the open source community as well as by the teachers and kids themselves has been created in the guise of Sugar running on fedora linux. Sugar comes with many pre-installed educational applications called activities. Its provided by Sugar Labs and has its own development wiki where people can contribute activities to the growing list. This list currently include a physics simulation programs (that really is child's play), turtle graphics, puzzles, ebook readers, various kinds of programming activities that have been made very simple, colourful and appealing even to the extent that software programs look like jigsaw puzzles that you fit together to get the turtle to move around the screen drawing geometric shapes. Many more sugar activities are available for download. Sugar comes pre-installed on the XO and is also freely available for anyone to run on their PC or Mac. Various formats are available with Sugar on a Stick being the most portable - boot your computer from the memory stick. Its also possible to run Sugar on virtual machines like VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop for Windows or Mac.

Core to this endeavour are a constructionist approach that leads to a focus on providing opportunity for self learning fueled by curiosity rather than setting an agenda for what should be learnt alongside providing the capabilities for collaboration. The XO laptops all have long range wifi for connecting to the internet but even if no internet infrastructure or wifi router are available, the XO laptops still automatically discover other XO laptops that are nearby and form a mesh so they can all communicate. This mesh can span up to 12 miles, with laptops between distant children acting as go-betweens. One of the core applications on the XO lets you see who is in your neighbourhood. You can talk with them by typing or using audio, every XO has a webcam too. You can also share any application so you can collaborate on drawing a picture or solving a problem or even reading a book.



You may think food is more important than laptops. The point is that the right kind of technology can massively amplify the effectiveness of not just education but also of social development. Knowledge about how to fish is more valuable than fish and an environment where you can create knowledge for yourself fuelled by your own curiosity and unfettered access to world knowledge is even more valuable. There are plenty of YouTube videos about this. These two sum up the mission nicely:
OLPC Mission Part 1
OLPC Mission Part 2

What do you think will be the consequences of connecting all children of the world together in a collaborative mesh of laptops over the internet? What do you think tomorrow could look like? For the most part kids ask pretty basic, and wise questions - and try and find answers to the questions the adults gave up on long ago. They typically don't pussy foot around either... sounds like the kind of change we need on this planet.