Back in 2005, The New York Times called it “The laptop that will save the world”. In early 2012, this durable, new super-low cost tablet, the XO-3, will debut with a promised price-point of $75 for the nonprofit called One Laptop Per Child.
“A child can do anything to this software and never break it,” explains Walter Bender, a co-founder of OLPC and a former director of the MIT Media Lab that created Sugar, the XO’s user interface. “Why? When you make mistakes you’re learning. When you don’t, you’re being incremental. Yet if penalty is high for making mistakes, you stop taking risks, you stop learning. We try to give kids a safe place to do trial and error, to go out there and do it in a way they can’t screw up.”
When the laptops went into mass production in November 2007, OLPC’s ambitious plan aimed to place a free computer into the hands of the world’s 1 billion impoverished children. Education is the exit ramp off the endless road of poverty, the organization argues, and because young people naturally take to computers, the idea is to use them as a way to bridge the so-called “digital gap” between the haves and the have-nots.
“We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”
Next week, the company plans to drop XO-3 from a helicopter into the hands of some the poorest 5-to-8-year-olds in the remotest regions of the world like Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Liberia. In a recent interview appearing in New Scientist, the father of OLPC Nicholas Negroponte explained that the idea is to discover how much a child working on his own can learn from a computer with just “modest” intervention. In turn, OLPC will learn from the kids. After two years, trained researchers will return to the site to evaluate its effects.
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