I have read bits here and there about the One Laptop Per Child program — the closest thing to the mythical “$100 laptop.” It has always sounded like a very cool concept to me. It’s a very simple laptop, well-constructed so that it withstands a great deal of wear and tear. It can be powered via solar panel or even via a pull cord (1 minute of pulling gets 10 minutes of battery life). It runs open source Linux and has wireless capability. There’s no CD drive, the processor is slow, and there’s very little memory — but it’s cheap, and it’s for kids! It has an amazing array of features geared towards kids, like networking with your classroom, web-surfing, RSS reader, built-in camera, drawing programs, and even a few downloadable programs.
Yesterday I came across the XO Giving website. For a $400 donation, one XO laptop will be sent to a child in a developing nation. You also get one sent to you to give to a child of your choosing (or keep it yourself, I suppose, although as I’ve said it is very kid-oriented). After subtracting the fair market value of the laptop, $200 of the donation is tax-deductable.
This is the only time so far that the laptop will be available to US customers, and part of the reason they decided to make it available is that they hope to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world who can provide feedback about how well it works as an education tool and help create open-source educational programs for the laptop.
What a cool idea!
