Yearly Archives: 2010

India’s tantalizing tablet

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As noted here last week, India’s Human Resource Development Minister Sibal announced an interest in distributing a $35 touchscreen tablet to students across India.  Charbax demonstrated the reference design used is likely from AllGo Embedded Systems, which recently displayed a matching ARM device.

While Fast Company, Wired, (and later All Things Considered) have responded  skeptically to the proposed cost, let’s assum that one day we will be able to make such tablets, just as we now have $100 laptops. (I don’t think they are far off – we likewise think we can have a more powerful, rugged tablet for twice that cost by the following year.)  What I want to know is: will the government invest in a national deployment, in providing equal access to rich and poor, and in the connectivity infrastructure needed to make this a truly empowering shift?

Some of the statements made suggest the government are considering a nation-wide 50% subsidy and promotion across over 5,000 schools. That’s a fantastic start — I hope their interest persists long enough to start such a project in earnest.

Update: We would be glad to share any of our tech and experience with an India project to help their vision succeed. Nicholas published an open letter to the Ministry inviting them to Cambridge.

A time to learn

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In early May, Save the Children‘s State of the World’s Mothers 2010 report ranked Afghanistan last among the 160 countries surveyed, in terms of how easy it was to raise children.

While medical care is often limited, and being an infant in Afghanistan poses many risks, it is also a tough place to grow up. Only 52% of primary aged school children are enrolled in school, where classes are often made up of more than fifty students. Despite the extraordinary restoration of public schools and teachers over the past decade, there is still a lack of teachers and school buildings, and children receive an average of 2.5 hours of school a day. That is half of what children in developed nations (OECD) receive.

These numbers reflect a vast improvement from when the Taliban controlled the country – over the past three years, school enrollment has grown from 800,000 students to 4.5 million. But youthful curiosity is not bounded by time spent in school.  We are working to make sure that, district by district, these children have tools and projects to explore and to experiment with, so they can have time to learn even when school does not have time for them.

A class of Afghan girls at work on their XOs. Photographed by Elissa Bogos

Note: Some information comes from the latest OLPC Afghanistan Briefing Note.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan

The XO-1.5 HS: Hackably Sweet

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Part 1 of a limited series

Gillian and I spent part of the day taking apart an XO-1.5 (HS edition!) and putting it back together.  We’ll be showing you how to do everything from a (2-minute!) keyboard replacement to a flash drive upgrade.  Stay tuned for the photo series and guide.

XO-1.5HS Teardown

Gillian removes the new keyboard

Mike upgrades his onboard storage.

Me swapping out the XO-1.5 onboard storage (that's a 4G Micro SD card)

$20-$40 laptops, in bits and pieces

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Humane Reader‘s $20 offline reader : needs only an external display, cables, and keyboard for a 38x25 monochrome display of Wikipedia or whatever text you please. Offered in XO green, it has been designed more as a tool for hackers than a scalable solution for offline reading.  From its own website:

The palm-sized device comes with an SD Card reader for storage and a micro-usb connector for both power and USB device action! The expansion headers break out maximum hackability, and are compatible with most Arduino expansion shields. Use most existing Arduino software, or write from fresh to take full advantage of the audio, video, IR, and keyboard capabilities of the platform.

And there’s talk of a $35 touchscreen tablet : Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal is personally promoting a reportedly $35 tablet computer, which he says will be available sometime in 2011. Charbax makes the case that he is referring to (and demoing) an AllGo reference design, which was on display in June’s Freescale Tech Forum.  They are still looking for a manufacturer.

Fast Company is extremely skeptical, since India’s last $10 computer was overhyped and misleadingly promoted. It wasn’t a laptop or even an entire computer, it was… hey, wait a minute… it was a cheaper Humane Reader, only done in white and with no industrial design! 

These look like fun, but not something I would necessarily want to use for too long at a stretch. In contrast, I’ve been toting my XO-1.5 HS around all week, and it is very satisfying… more after the jump.
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Brunch in the Bronx & other events this weekend

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A MOUTH-WATERING TRANSCONTINENTAL ADVENTURE:

Brunch in the Bronx

Bronx Brunch: Sunday @ noon

  • Sunday at noon there is an XO BRNch in the BRONX to discuss OLPC NYC and updates from Africa.  All are welcome, but rsvp to Mago and Holt so they can be ready with appropriate quantities of delicious food.  Lidet Tilahun will be joining by phone to share news from OLPC in Ethiopia. (mail : holt at laptop dot org)
  • To whet your appetite, Saturday afternoon Montevideo and CeibalJAM are hosting a miniJam for artists, from 14:00 to 20:00.  Christoph Derndorfer will be reporting live.
  • And Saturday is the first Drumbeat Boston event, celebrating projects supporting the Open Web, including OLPC.

250 Palestinian Refugee Children receive laptops in the Amari Boys School!

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Today marks the end of the first-ever XO Summer Camp in the Amari Boys School in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Following the teacher training last week, children came school this week to get familiarized with XOs well before the start of their new school year. The schoolteachers did an amazing job relaying their new skills with the XO to the kids along with help from our amazing volunteers at PaleXO!

The children spent three days learning and exploring activities on their XOs both at home and in the classroom, and took to mastering the programs even faster than their teachers! Kids loved connecting and sharing with each other through the Mesh Network and had a blast playing with the various activities, even learning how to type their names in Write was a joyful game. When showing children the Record activity, featuring a camera, kids were thrilled; unanimously across classrooms kids began to break out dancing in their seats for the camera!

They were so excited to begin; all the students began lining up outside their school as early as 7am each morning to start their day of fun and learning. This was a great opportunity to make learning fun and stimulate school attendance, even in the summer time! As a great finale to the summer children’s parents were invited to attend today’s session in order to maximize community participation in the OLPC project. Children were excited to show their parents what they had learned, and the principal hosted a brief orientation session in order to explain the importance of the project to the future of their children’s education.

Next week we begin our XO Summer Camp at the Amari Girls’ School!

More Pictures!