Educating the World: One Laptop per Child
First nicknamed the “$100 laptop,” the current B2 model of the XO Children's Machine costs nearer to $150. Photo courtesy of Mike McGregor.
A nonprofit start-up with roots at MIT promises to leap the digital divide with a cute little lime-green laptop. One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte thinks of himself “as an extremist when it comes to predicting and initiating change.” That goes a long way toward explaining his plan to put 100 million laptops in the hands of kids from 6 to 16 within the next few years-starting in some of the world's poorest countries. The idea is to give young children a tool that they can use to explore the world, build knowledge, express themselves, and collaborate with neighbors near and far.
This February the nonprofit One Laptop per Child began distributing the first B2 test computers to children in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay. So far only a few thousand beta-test models of the XO Children's Machine have been produced — they're all being built by hand until the machine's tooling is finalized — but by year's end OLPC's goal is to ship 5 million laptops to 5 million kids in places such as hardscrabble neighborhoods outside Abuja, Nigeria, and remote, rural villages in Thailand.
A world away from that reality, on a sunny Friday afternoon in April 2007 at OLPC headquarters — a bright, open-plan office in the epicenter of Cambridge, Massachusetts's MIT spin-off high-tech district — developers and programmers are typing away maniacally on oversized monitors with the diminutive green XOs all around them. Some of the little laptops sit with their screens off and their insides on view, hooked up to diagnostic machines. Others hang upside down from scaffolding on the ceiling, like a colony of giant, bright-green butterflies, where they're kept out of the way while running long-term tests on their innovative wireless “mesh network” (which will let kids collaborate with their neighbors and explore all the knowledge on the Internet with even one satellite connection to share).
The programmers are tweaking the kid-friendly operating system (on its 385th version, as of early April) and making sure of things like the computer's built-in camera's working with the latest versions of all software on the machine. One that I play with develops a previously-unseen bug that makes weird, beautiful patterns all around the screen when the camera is on and the cursor is moved. Some of the programmers seem more excited to see this interesting new aberrant behavior than they are to know other features are working properly.
But the team at OLPC insists this is not a technology story — it's an education story. Once you look beyond the cutting-edge high-resolution screen and foot pedal powered battery charger, you see a powerful tool for learning.
Why the Laptop?
It's a question they've been asked before: With all of the obstacles kids face in the developing world, why focus on providing them with laptops?
“Substitute the word ‘education’ for ‘laptop’ and you will not ask that question,” Nicholas Negroponte told NRTA Live & Learn. “If children are starving, they need food. If they are ill, they need medicine. Under any of these conditions, they need education too. Furthermore, education will eventually provide a well-fed and healthier society.”
“If you look at the world, there are some 1 to 2 billion children in the age group of primary and secondary school,” he says. “Half of the schools are rural, usually without electricity, often without teachers showing up or very able (when they do), and sometimes school is under a tree. We can fix this slowly, brick by brick, trained teacher by trained teacher. That will take a long time and the world should do that. In the meanwhile, let's leverage children themselves, bring them into their own education.”
First of all, the laptop is like a library in a box, an easy and cheap way to deliver textbooks, not to mention all of the information available on the Internet. But more than that, it's a tool that kids can use to appropriate knowledge and make it their own.
“There's no question that you can use the laptop like a mimeograph machine to crank out worksheets, but that's not enough,” says Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software and content. “We want to get kids expressing, exploring, creating, and debugging.”
Bender, former head of the MIT Media Lab, adds, “I want every child in the world to get the opportunity to learn the way kids at MIT do. It's a great way to learn.”
Each laptop will come with three sets of tools to help kids learn how to learn: a collection of tools for exploring knowledge, including an Internet browser, a library and a multimedia player; tools for expressing, including software for composing music, writing, and making art; and tools for communication, including email, chat, and voice-over-Internet, plus a setup for a collaborative word processor. The software on the laptop is designed to integrate exploring, learning, and communications in every activity, so kids can explore math concepts in graphical math simulators and then share their creations, or compose music and play together in a jam session. “It's actually ‘one-laptop-per-child-and-teacher,’” Bender says, “so the teacher is learning and communicating and critiquing at the same time.”
Negroponte, author of Being Digital, a founder of Wired magazine, and a guru of the digital culture that changed the face of life for hundreds of millions of people in the past decade, has dreamed of getting computers into the hands of all the world's children for decades, since he co-founded the MIT Media Lab in 1985. Negroponte has been involved in a number of earlier attempts to get laptops to children, including a foundation called 2B1, which set up networked computers in remote villages in Cambodia.
“Everything we have done in the past has been a pilot project, a boutique effort that has not been scaled,” Negroponte says. “But now we use the metaphor of immunization. The laptops immunize children against ignorance. You cannot immunize a small group, it must be everybody, otherwise the disease spreads.”
Negroponte launched the OLPC initiative in 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, promising a $100 laptop for all of the world's children. The actual cost of the laptop at the time of launch will be closer to $150, but as production increases and the price of the components of the laptop goes down, the cost should fall below $100 in the next year or so.
The core of the OLPC team comes from the MIT Media Lab, co-founded by Negroponte in 1985. In addition to him and Bender, a pioneer in electronic publishing who originated the MIT course “Puzzles, Games, and Other Things to Think With,” there's Chief Technologist Mary Lou Jepsen, who made the engineering breakthrough that led to the XO's innovative, high-resolution, low-powered screen. Jepsen is a former chip designer for Intel who continues to teach at the Media Lab. And there's Seymour Papert, who co-founded MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab, pioneered the use of computers as tools for learning, and developed the theory of constructivist education from that experience and from his work with psychologist Jean Piaget.
From outside the Media Lab fold, there's Chief Education Officer Antonio Battro, who is considered a world leader in the new field of neuroeducation, an MD and PhD who specializes in the development of basic cognitive and perceptual processes in children and adolescents. OLPC has also built partnerships with leaders in the tech industry, including processor manufacturer AMD, Linux operating system producers Red Hat, top laptop manufacturer Quanta, plus online giants eBay and Google.
Skeptics and Allies
The OLPC initiative has not been universally embraced. Some, including executives from companies with their own educational machines that must be sold for profit, have belittled the XO as a gadget. The latest generation of the laptop, with cutting edge features not yet available to high-end consumers, seems to refute those claims. Other critics have questioned the lack of detailed implementation plans and the lack of emphasis on teacher training and pedagogy.
“When people ask me who will train the teachers to teach the students how to use the laptops, I wonder what planet they come from,” Negroponte says. “The child as teacher is less common in other work. In ours it is key.”
“Right now OLPC needs to launch, for which a big-bang effort is required to trigger the supply chain and start the price in a downward spiral,” Negroponte tells me early in April. “That needs to be kick-started by a few governments and major philanthropists, after which a more incremental, step-by-step approach will follow.”
OLPC welcomes teachers and people from the technology to collaborate in the effort. “Like the Wikipedia, we need to create wiki textbooks,” Negroponte says. “To do this, we need the help of students and teachers alike.”
The laptop is being built on the open-source model, which means that kids, teachers and others not only have a chance to design the software and curricula for the XO, they have the power to dig down and rewrite anything they don't like, from lesson plans to the core operating system that makes the computer work.
“It's fundamental to allowing a much broader participation for the kids,” Bender says. “We want them to be able to dig down as deep as they possibly can.”
The Learning Travels with the Child
Most work in development and education focuses on “school” and “teaching,” Negroponte says. “In the best of situations, children spend only 12 to 14 hours per week in classrooms, due to the predominance of two-shift schools. So, as a start, kids need to own the laptops, take them home, use them seamlessly in their lives.” When kids bring the laptop home, their siblings, their parents, their whole community has access to the learning.
It doesn't matter if the kids don't know how to read or type yet, Bender says. “Their passions are what's going to teach them to read. Love is a better master than duty.”
“Children are innately global,” Negroponte says. “The world's biggest problem today is nationalism; it is a real disease. Connecting children to each other will give them the opportunity to learn something most adults have not: There are multiple points of view on any subject. Perspective is worth a lot more than IQ.”
That's a lesson that kids, and adults, everywhere could stand to study, but OLPC is focusing on the developing world for now because there are no other options for most kids there.
“I'm just as interested in having kids here have access, but there are lots of ways that children here can get their hands on a computer,” Bender says. He makes the comparison: A $1000 laptop amortized over 5 years is $200, and our school systems could make that a priority and get kids a laptop. “In Guatemala, which spends an average of $200 per year per child, $1000 is completely out of the question. But $100 amortized over 5 years is $20. At $20, you can have the conversation.”
Making a Difference
So if OLPC is successful, overcoming all obstacles in the way of reform in the developing world, inspiring action instead of apathy in the rich nations, and delivering laptops to every kid on the planet, when will we start seeing a difference in the world?
“Depends what kind of difference you are looking for,” Negroponte says. “Elimination of poverty or creation of world peace may take a while. In the meanwhile, children are any nation's most precious natural resource. Within a short period, like 2 to 3 years, we'll see the role of children changing in remote, rural, and poor parts of the world. We'll see more passion for learning, more self-starting, more kids going to school and to higher grades.”
Bender recalls a recent visit to the school in Abuja, Nigeria, one of the places where the first round of machines are even now being distributed to children, while they were doing inventory of school supplies. “Science equipment: one lever,” he says. “Not even a fulcrum. We've got to give these kids more.”
After the interview, I sit down to play with one of the laptops. The zooming Sugar interface, which is radically different from the desktop-and-windows system I've been using for 20 years, took a few seconds to figure out. Before I know it I'm browsing the photo-heavy encyclopedia and painting and pasting text in an art program. Bender pops in and out, uploading new versions of software, showing me how to use the built-in camera, bustling across the room to report a bug to a developer working on the software.
Then a small child, about 7 years old, appears across the room.
“I'm going to have to get back to serious work,” Bender tells me. Then he sits down with the child to take notes on bugs the boy had found in his prototype laptop.
The future is coming and these kids-in Cambridge and Abuja-will get there first. It's hard for us to see from the world we live in, but one way or another, the children — the real learning machines — will show us the way.
How to Get Involved
The best way for teachers, students, and other academics or potential OLPC collaborators to get involved is to visit the OLPC Wiki site. OLPC's Walter Bender issues this blanket invitation:.“We want each person who reads this story to think about their favorite lesson plan and put it in the wiki so we can get it to these kids.“
About the Author
Jake Miller regularly writes for NRTA Live & Learn from his home base in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Spring 2007.
