About OLPC

About One Laptop Per Child

Site: K-Net Meeting Place
Meeting Place: OLPC Little Green Machines!
Book: About OLPC
Printed by: Guest User
Date: Friday, 22 November 2024, 03:08 PM

Table of Contents

What is One Laptop Per Child?

From: http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/index.shtml

The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege.

It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project

In 2002, MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte experienced first-hand how connected laptops transformed the lives of children and their families in a remote Cambodian village. A seed was planted: If every child in the world had access to a computer, what potential could be unlocked? What problems could be solved? These questions eventually led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child, and the creation of the XO laptop.

Nicholas Negropante

OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. While children are by nature eager for knowledge, many countries have insufficient resources to devote to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per child (compared to an average of $7,500 in the United States). By giving children their very own connected XO laptop, we are giving them a window to the outside world, access to vast amounts of information, a way to connect with each other, and a springboard into their future. And we’re also helping these countries develop an essential resource—educated, empowered children.

Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonwealth, because it lacks the tools to do so.

It is time to rethink this equation.

Given the resources that developing countries can reasonably allocate to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per pupil, compared to the approximately $7500 per pupil spent annually in the U.S.—even a doubled or redoubled national commitment to traditional education, augmented by external and private funding, would not get the job done. Moreover, experience strongly suggests that an incremental increase of “more of the same”—building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment—is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world.

Standing still is a reliable recipe for going backward.

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.

Extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and most remote populations on earth, constructionism emphasizes what Papert calls “learning learning” as the fundamental educational experience. A computer uniquely fosters learning learning by allowing children to “think about thinking”, in ways that are otherwise impossible. Using the XO as both their window on the world, as well as a highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential.

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

OLPC Introductory Videos

A brief video exploring the mission and principles of OLPC and the XO Laptop. 

Nicholas Negroponte's TED talk on OLPC

A TED talk on OLPC, from founder Nicholas Negroponte - from: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html

Why OLPC?

From: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Core_principles/lang-en

The OLPC project has had international success, bringing 1.4 million affordable laptops to underprivileged children around the world. In addition, the OLPC project is a non-governmental, non profit, education driven organization built around five essential principles:

1. Child Ownership: The XO laptop is created for elementary school children – low cost, durable, friendly and beautiful. The laptop turns into a mobile school, where learning becomes portable and shared amongst family, friends and the community.

2. Low Ages: The XO is designed for the use of children ages 6 to 12, where playing is the basis of human learning. Children do not need to know how to write or read to enjoy and learn with an XO.

3. Saturation: OLPC is committed to elementary education, to reach “digital saturation” where the whole community becomes responsible for this focus on shared education, and the children receive support from institutions, individuals, and groups around them.

4. Connection: The XO has been designed to work in a collaborative environment where the laptops are connected to others nearby automatically. Children are permanently connected to chat, sharing information, making music together, editing texts, or collaborative games, thus allowing for formal or informal learning.

5. Free and Open Source: all children are learners and teachers, and this spirit of collaboration is amplified by free and open source tools. As children grow and pursue new ideas, their software, content, resources and tools should be able to grow with them.

The XO Laptop

From: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/index.shtml

The XO Laptop:

A small machine – with a big mission. The XO laptop is a learning machine designed and built especially for children, some of who live in the most remote environments. It’s about the size of a small textbook. It has built in wireless and a unique screen that is readable under direct sunlight for outdoor use. It is extremely durable, brilliantly functional, energy efficient, and most importantly fun.

The XO is about the size of a textbook, and lighter than a lunchbox. It has no hazardous materials, and its batteries contain no toxic heavy metals. Experience shows that laptop components that are most likely to fail are the hard drive and internal connectors – the XO has no hard drive to crash and only have two internal cables. Its wireless antennas, which far outperform the typical laptop, double as external covers for the USB ports, which are protected internally as well. The display is also cushioned by internal “bumpers”. The estimated product lifetime is at least five years.

XO laptop 1XO Laptop 2XO Laptop 3XO Laptop 4

 

Hardware highlights:

- Built in microphone for voice communication and recording, with an external microphone jack

- Ultra low power, ultra high resolution screen with a black and white mode for reading in direct sunlight

- Two sets of four direction cursor-controlled keys in the display frame

- Built in camera providing still photography and video recording capabilities

- 3 USB ports as well as a SD memory card slot

- Antenna ears are rugged and are vastly superior to most conventional laptops

For more detailed information, please go to: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/index.shtml

 

Hardware Specs

From: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

Physical dimensions

Core electronics

Display

Integrated peripherals

External connectors

Battery

BIOS/loader

Environmental specifications

Regulatory requirements

SUGAR Operating System

Adapted from: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php

One of the first things that users realize when they open an XO laptop is "This isn't Windows!"

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.

Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by one-million children in more than forty countries.

Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers through a live USB or CD. Sugar is free/libre and open-source software.

What makes Sugar different?

· Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.

· Activities, not applications. .

· Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data.

· The Journal records everything you do: It is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work.

· Sugar runs on most computer hardware, including slower machines.

· Sugar is free software: It is written in the modern Python language and easily customized.

· Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.

Sugar Desktop 1

What are the benefits of using Sugar?

· Hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing: browsing, writing, etc.

· Built-in collaboration system: peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and single-click sharing.

· The Journal is a built-in portfolio assessment tool that serves as a forum for discussion between children, parents, and teachers.

· A discoverable learning platform: it uses simple means to reach to complex ends.

· Designed for local appropriation : it has built-in tools for making changes and improvements and a growing global community of support. 25 languages are currently available.

· An emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: more engaged learners are able to tackle authentic problems.

· Available in a wide variety of forms: as part of GNU/Linux distributions; LiveCD, LiveUSB; and in a virtual machine.

Sugar Home 2

What are the Sugar advantages?

· Superior pedagogical framework

· Unique collaboration and journaling (evaluation) features

· Large & successful installed base with hundreds of activities

· Large and committed community base (both developers and teachers)

· 24/7 community support; training and workshop materials available

· Rapidly expanding teacher-driven development

· Easily localizable and customizable

· Free open source software: no licensing fees

· A global project : no single point of dependency or failure

· Great potential for local job creation

Sugar Home 3

Sugar Introductory Video

Here's a short video describing the SUGAR operating system.  Enjoy!

Benefits of using SUGAR

From: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/index.shtml

Benefits

Learning is our main goal. We do not focus on computer literacy, as that is a by-product of the fluency children will gain through use of the laptop for learning. Children—especially young children—need the opportunity to learn far more than Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Of course, picking up these skills, having grown up with a laptop, will be readily accomplished.

Epistemologists from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Seymour Papert agree that you learn through doing. This suggests that if you want more learning, you want more doing. Thus OLPC puts an emphasis on software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction. Love is a better master than duty. Using the laptop as the agency for engaging children in constructing knowledge based upon their personal interests and providing them tools for sharing and critiquing these constructions will lead them to become learners and teachers.

As a matter of practicality and given the necessity to enhance performance and reliability while containing costs, XO is not burdened by the bloat of excess code, the “featureitis” that is responsible for much of the clumsiness, unreliability, and expense of many modern laptops.

SUGAR activities

OLPC Canada

From: http://www.olpccanada.com/content.php?id=3

This is the first National OLPC program in Canada. A pilot program that will provide up to 5000 laptops to children 6-12 years of age in rural, remote and urban communities. The customized programs address some of the challenges facing Aboriginal youth in Canada including literacy, physical health, mental health, etc.

OLPC Canada offers eight customized programs, in addition to over 30 OLPC programs, for Aboriginal Youth including:


When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

OLPC Canada List

For more information regarding their extensive program list, please go to: http://www.olpccanada.com/content.php?id=6

About the Resource Developer

 

Mike Mak in Sandy Lake

Mike in Thomas Fiddler Memorial Elementary School, Sandy Lake First Nations

Michael Mak is a Bachelor of Health Science Student in the Global Health Specialization from McMaster University. He is also part of the One Laptop Per Child project, an international program that seeks to provide the world’s poorest children with rugged, low cost, low power connected laptop to create self-empowered learning and connectivity. With the determined belief that education is the key social determinant for health, Michael with Keeywatinook Okimakanak (Northern Chiefs) and K-NET developed the Little Green Machines site to support Canadian schools that have XO laptops in their classrooms, as well as a forum for educators to collaborate and share creative ways to use the XO! You can email Michael at makamizz@gmail.com