We saw a report by Human Rights Watch on Edtech hazards to children, and an academic media article covering it for the Australian context.

We thought about our OLPC XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75, XO-4, and NL3 laptops and checked our processes against the advice to technology companies.

1. stop collecting and processing children’s data for user profiling, etc; the only data that we collected was laptop serial number and Sugar activity name, for determining usage patterns of OLPC OS, not user profiling,
2. stop sharing children’s data for purposes that are unnecessary; the data we collected was not shared or sold,
3. apply child flags when data is shared; the data was not shared, but we do keep aware that the little data we have is child-related data,
4. inventory and identify personal data; no personal data is collected, and we do not track serial number against child, though we can’t guarantee that this isn’t done by the owners of the laptop, such as schools and other education facilities,
5. stop collecting categories of data that heighten risks to rights, such as location data and advertising identifiers; no such data was collected, and our laptops did not contain a location system such as GPS.

Looking forward, we partner with several other technology providers, and we rely on them to comply with regulations and human rights.

Raspberry Pi are a series of small computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. — Wikipedia

The Sugar learning environment used on OLPC OS also works on Raspberry Pi, though it does take a few extra steps.

See How to load Sugar on Raspbian Buster.

Get updated activities for our XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 and XO-4 laptops. Use the Software Update icon in My Settings.

Or to install afresh, see the release notes for OLPC OS 13.2.11.

Updates are better dark modes, fullscreen feature, better font sizes, many new translations, and lots of fixes.

Browse activity has a better fullscreen presentation, a dark mode for reading PDF files, and fixes to sharing with others.

Calculate activity has non-arabic numerals, better font size, a few fixes to display precision and mathematical errors.

Chat activity can now search chat text.

Maze activity offers hazards in the maze and draws faster.

Moon activity includes lunar ephemerides to 2024.

Pippy activity has a dark mode, and shares source code notebook tabs better.

Read activity has a dark mode, for reading electronic books at night.

Terminal activity has a dark mode, a new button to clear the history, and fixes to the Help button.

Write activity can merge and split table cells, and fixes to the create table feature.

OLPC OS 13.2.11 is the work of OLPC, volunteers at Sugar Labs, along with students and contestants at Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Our thanks to all contributors, testers, upstreams, and those who have provided feedback of any kind.

Gizmodo’s Andrew Liszewski has written about the OLPC XO-1.

With roughly three million OLPC XO laptops shipped to children since we began, we are glad to have achieved change.

Sugar learning software is still available from OLPC on our laptops, or from Sugar Labs on anyone else’s laptops. Some of the Sugar software is available for tablets and phones, and a new Music Blocks Programming Language is published.

Sugar Labs participated in Google Summer of Code this year, and is preparing now for Google Code-In.

Children are still without food, water, safety, parents, education, books, devices, and connectivity. There’s still work to be done.

Let’s do it!

OLPC France has deployed Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2018 tablets with Sugarizer OS at the Mendela school. For more details, see https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarizer_Saint-Ouen_deployment

Learners at Tooraweenah Public School in outback Australia being taught how to use OLPC XO-4 with Turtle Blocks. Their task was to use the turtle to draw shapes, like squares, and hexagons.

Part of a weekly visit by a volunteer technology teacher and OLPC’s CTO.