One Laptop per Child

OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.

In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation.  I am curious as to how it will turn out.  Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school.  They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work.  They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.

Two girls with custom XOs

Customized Sugar desktop

The Paraguay deployment has been growing quickly, with help from OLPC world-traveller Bernie Innocenti.  Students there are trying out the latest build of Sugar (0.84), with its dual-desktop (Gnome and Sugar).  They are the first school to test out recent efforts to backport that release to the XO-1.  Their motivation to install the update?  They absolutely love the GNOME desktop backgrounds and screensavers.

They also are expert at customizing their XOs, with stickers, screennames that span many lines to make ascii art, and iconic backgrounds (using the freeform icon layout).  Bernie also reports on the programs they use most, and on how they are learning to modify the software on their machines.

For regular updates from the field, and lessons in English and Spanish computer slang, follow along on his travelog.

Ready for vampires

Batovi Games Studio, a game development company headquartered in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, recently released a long mini-game,  Super Vampire Ninja Zero, for the XO. This is the most recent game being developed in parallel for the XO and the desktop PC.  Batovi has been around since 2005 and has recently begun expanding to new platforms.  It is great to see their handiwork running within Sugar.

Bernie reports that SVNZ is currently a hit in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as among ninjas. It may be the most polished XO game release since Sim City for the XO came out. Now if only their forces were combined… perhaps in Vampires Take Micropolis, Online Edition?

Update: parents and teachers are often unhappy that their children play games.  No less Doom and SVNZ.  I sympathize with this.  I also remember how a love for games taught me how much you could do with a computer (and how that was my first impetus to program something — how awesome to be able to make something it’s fun to watch others play!).  This is part of the genius of Scratch – it combines the sharable joy of games and animations with an easy learning curve for discovering algorithms and techniques.

We’ve just delivered 744 XOs (already in Dari and Pashto) to Zarghona Ana middle school in Kandahar, Afghanistan, bringing the total number of Afghan children with XOs to 3,700.

This has been one of our trickiest deployments to date, and thanks are due to Afghanistan’s ICT and Education Ministries, USAID’s ASMED project, Roshan (Afghanistan’s primary telecoms provider), and Paiwastoon, our local implementers. Read below for the full press release.

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD PROVIDES CHILDREN OF AFGHANISTAN ACCESS TO A MODERN EDUCATION
XO laptops connect a new generation of Afghan children to the world’s  body of knowledge, sowing seeds for long-term peace and progress

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday in Costa Rica, Secretary Clinton gave a moving speech about the necessity of bridging socio-economic gaps across the Americas at the Pathways to Prosperity Ministerial.

She started off by commending Chile’s immediate response to the Haitian earthquake which indicated the increasing strength and cooperation of the region. She goes on to praise region efforts at economic growth including our very own OLPC initiative in Uruguay:

And like you, I have followed the progress that Uruguay and Panama have made towards spreading the benefits of the digital age through initiatives that distribute laptops to children. I was just in Uruguay, meeting with the out-going president and now-president Mujica, and their “one laptop per child” program has given a great boost to learning and access to the wider world.

She says that programs like this “can be a model for the rest of us.” Thanks for the support, Hillary!

US Secretary of State Clinton at the Third Ministerial Meeting in Costa Rica

In her speech, she also highlights six goals of Pathways to Prosperity that the US will focus on helping:
1. The creation of “small business development centers where people can go to get information and advice about starting a business.”
2. Support for “women entrepreneurs across the hemisphere.”
3. Modernization of customs procedures.
4. Better communication through the spread of English in Latin America and Spanish in the US.
5. Green the operations of small to medium-sized businesses.
6. Modernize lending laws and regulations.

Great news from Afghanistan! To celebrate their achievements to date, OLPC Afghanistan is having a ceremony for the deployment on Sunday the 07th of March 2010 in Kandahar City. Below a press release for the event and highlights a few of their major accomplishments.

New Technology and Interactive Educational Content Comes to Kandahar

(KANDAHAR, Afghanistan) – Students and teachers from Zarghona Ana middle school here will receive 774 XO laptop computers on March 07th as a gateway to new educational content.

The project is designed to use technology to overcome educational challenges and improve results and opportunities for children and teachers. It is already actively used by more than 3000 children in Afghanistan and more than 1.4 million worldwide.

Already completely translated into Dari and Pashto, the XO laptops provide access to a digital library in the school with thousands of pages of content. Students will also benefit from having access to 150 educational mini games in Dari/Pashto and interactive versions of curriculum content providing guidance and feedback on exercises that students otherwise may not have access to, thereby enhancing self study.

The laptop is specially designed for a tough and rugged environment for children, using three times less electricity than normal laptops; the built in sealed dust-free system is well suited to the Afghan environment. It can thus help overcome difficulties with lack of time and improved guidance as teachers work in shifts by providing quizzes, simulators and feedback to children, extending learning time and providing access to more content than ever before.

Under the leadership of the Ministry of Education the project brings together a unique partnership with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, The One Laptop Per Child Foundation based in the United States of America, Roshan, Afghanistan’s leading telecommunications provider, USAID/Afghanistan Small and Medium Enterprise Development (ASMED).and a local private enterprise IT company PAIWASTOON.

The OLPC Afghanistan team has accomplished world leading achievements to date including:
1. A pedal that utilizes human power for the laptop.
2. The first OLPC deployment with a purely wireless system that does not need any cabling to create school networks.
3. Created a new digital library system that works offline to copy educational websites to be accessible without needing Internet and quickly indexes content.

“The main goal of this project is to improve the teaching and learning environment in the school while giving students the opportunity to further their educational experience at home using the XO laptops. Children having access to this type of tool can further their education and be actively engaged in their own study. They learn, share, create and have the opportunity to collaborate with their fellow students. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”

Said Farooq Wardak, Minister of Education

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology are the government institutions tasked with improving education and the information technology sectors. They work to collectively embed communication technology and standardizing technology in the education sectors and establish platforms to transform Afghan society and government institution to information based society and governance.

For more information:
Press Contact: Mohamed Salim Hayran (Ministry of Education Information Communication Director & Afghanistan OLPC Project Manager) –
Email salim.hayran@moe.gov.af || salim_hayran@yahoo.co.uk
Mobile +93 (0)700399039 || (0)778877146
Or see OLPC Afghanistan’s website at www.olpc.af