Laptops for kids discussion

Some of this post I took straight from a blog post written by the guys at 37signals.

A hundred dollar laptop must be a piece of garbage, right? Actually, there’s some impressive technology in the One Laptop per Child machine being hawked by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte. He discussed it on 60 Minutes.

I also saw a version of it demonstrated by Frank Moss at the Cape Cod Technology Council annual dinner.

For one thing, it’s the first laptop with a screen you can use outdoors in full sunlight. It’s also built to withstand harsh weather (“You can pour water on the keyboard…You can dip the base into a bathtub. You can carry it the rain. It’s more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn’t even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: dirt, sand, I mean, there’s no place for it to go into the machine.”)

Other features: A built-in camera that takes stills and video, a stylus area, ear-like radio antennas that give the computer 2-3 times better Wi-Fi range than a regular laptop, the battery lasts 10-12 hours with heavy use, and you can charge it up with a crank or a salad spinner (a minute or two of spinning gets you get 10-20 minutes of reading).



The OLPC site discusses the machine’s benefits and how it avoids bloat:

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…

As a matter of practicality and given the necessity to enhance performance and reliability while containing costs, OLPC 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. OLPC will start up in an instant and move briskly through its operations. We accomplish this by focusing on only those features that children need for learning.

The user interface is also specially designed to put collaboration at the core of the user experience.

Although the OLPC hardware is impressive, I don't think it is the correct solution for most students in the US. I am focused on trying to come up with a sustainable plan to bring laptops into the Barnstable school district.

Over the next 24 months there will be an explosion of robust laptops or student notebook computers for price points at around $500. The requirement is that the machine lasts for four years and internet access is robust enough so that web applications take over most of the work requirements.

With a lease program, I do believe $500 per child can be sustained in an ongoing manner.