OLPC Wins Popular Science Award

paulmac84 writes "Popular Science has released their Best of What's New 2006 awards. In the computing section the One Laptop Per Child project took home the Grand Prize. From the article: 'The goal of the XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece. But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn't just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs — by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things — it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine's energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages.' The Innovation of The Year Award went to 'the alpha nail that makes your home twice as tough'. Sometimes the simple ideas really are the best."

Re:Abraham Maslow never mentioned laptops

[patrixmyth]

So go spend $130 on immunizing children. If you don't like what they're doing to make the world a better place, then go make it better your own way. Maslow didn't tell us how to make our world better, just what motivates our basic self-interest.

Re:A better goal: One water well per village

[Biogenesis]

Exactly. Hell, laptops don't even seem to help students in industrial nations. One of my cousins goes to a private school (in Sydney) where every student is required to have a laptop, from what he says everyone just uses them to waste time gaming :p. I go to the university of Sydney and suprisingly few people carry laptops around. Nobody in my 3rd year physics classes does, and only one (out of 20 or so) in my computational physics class does. However, USYD has ready access to computing facilities for all the students anyway, perhaps if that wasn't supplied students would feel more of a need for their own laptop.

One of the things we need to realise is that we use computers mainly as tools for dealing with a modern world. We need to do banking, so many of us use internet banking, many shop online because the service is available, we type reports on computers because we're involved in work/studies which require them. None of these things are required by a mostly agricultural society attempting to exist without enough clean drinking water.

OLPC is a great idea, but only because the people who came up with it exists in a world where laptops are a usefull tool. If you want to help their education send them books. I've heard reports form people working on a Christian missionary ship the Doulos and quite often when they arrive in a poor country teachers will go to the ships bookshop and whatever they've got end up being that year's material.

Anyway, there's probably someone on Earth who will benefit from OLPC, and it seems a lot of good engineering was achieved through the project, but I believe it's too early for it to be usefull to most of its intended audience.

I just don't get the point

[Kuciwalker]

I understand and agree with the point that many of the places where these are going already have fresh water, food, etc. and investments in education are absolutely critical to their growth. But how are laptops really going to help at all? Computers are magical educational devices. You need good teachers for computers to be effective at all in the classroom. I don't know how much training teachers in these countries have using computers as educational tools. And then, why not just have a few shared computers? I don't think there's a single Western country that even approaches one laptop per child, and that's because they aren't the alpha and omega of education like some think them to be.

Re:A better goal: One water well per village

[Drogo007]

"If you want to help their education send them books."

Isn't something like OLPC the perfect medium for distributing books? Instead of one book in that volume of space, dump hundreds or thousands on it. Suddenly distributing useful books to the world becomes much easier.

People go on about how useless these would be to the average third world person. But combined with some basic education and the proper set of software, these could be the most incredibly useful things concieved of. Health problems? Pull up the medical journals/textbooks stored on the OLPC. Agricultural Problems? Pull up information on farming, wells, animal husbandry, etc.

The way PopSci described the laptops, they're low power tools that don't share a whole awful lot in common with what your average slashgeek thinks of when you say the word "laptop". But as the parent poster alluded to, they make an absolutely perfect way to get useful information to the third world in a very widespread way.

Re:A better goal: One water well per village

[Denial93]

Most poor do not live in rural villages. Estimates put around 1 billion of them into suburban slums. So they can buy water and food if they have money. But the rampant lack of it means no one has interests to protect against those who thrive from the situation, i.e. gangs. What these people need most is some means of income that doesn't involve crime and, chiefly, is accessible to a larger fraction of the population than just the mobile, young, single males who work as day-laborers downtown. I.e. they need some viable economy, and while they don't need to compete with the big inner-city businesses, they need to be strong enough to warrant some police protection and allow some resistance against gang rule.

I do think processing power is an important part of that, because it makes possible small businesses and social organization (unions, churches, even soccer leagues), thus creating a stable society where it plainly doesn't exist now. Most significantly, masses of laptops are more likely than individual valuable items (like wells) to escape seizure and monopolization by those with the means to just take things. Even if One Laptop Per Child only allowed teenagers to mass-produce copies of current movies and sell them downtown, that's a move into the direction of equal distribution of wealth, and a stable society.

Re:A better goal: One water well per village

[jbrader]

I am really tired of this argument. Of course its geek thinking the people who thought of it are geeks, so they're using the expertise they have to help out. If your a doctor than stop bitching and use your expertise to help out in some different way.

Re:I just don't get the point

[MichaelSmith]

Computers are magical educational devices. You need good teachers for computers to be effective at all in the classroom. I don't know how much training teachers in these countries have using computers as educational tools

Firstly young kids are amazingly tech savvy. Secondly the most important use case for this laptop is as an electronic book reader. In an environment where paper text books the ability to share electronic copies of reference material is very valuable.

In any event, we will know how this went in a year or two. I can't wait to find out how it goes.

Re:A better goal: One water well per village

[Alef]

Yup, I understand that some people think OLPC will make for a better world. But this is geek thinking. However for the poor in rural villages, there's much more need for more basic things like clean water and other non-geeky needs.

This argument is repeated over and over again. Yes, there is no doubt there is a need for clean water in many areas of the world, but there is also a need for education and basic access to information technology. Why is there a problem that some people are trying to mitigate the second problem? It is not like we don't have enough resources to do both -- if we really wanted to, and there weren't a lot of political and sociological problems impeding it.

There are endless other places where we throw away resources that could have been used to help people in need. The OLPC project isn't exactly the first I would complain about.

It's an investment in communities & their chil

[maggard]

Yes, Children need housing, food, water, medical care, parenting, etc.

Nobody has ever argued against this.

But children also need an education.

They need it, their communities need for them to be educated, as a global society we need them to be educated.

Furthermore, not all developing nation children are starving refugees in camps. Many are rural children living in stable housing, going to school part of the time. Or urban children in comparable circumstances, with water & food but facing little upward mobility.

The OLPC projct is a way of getting these children tools. Electronic texts. Texts that they can download for free. Text in their native languages. Reference texts, ones they can use to apply to their, and their families, lives. It's about providing them with spreadsheets and a basic mathematics curriculum. The latest news in their communities, in their languages. It's about them communicating with their peers. It's about browsing the web and learning about the world beyond their immediate view.

The budget for educating these children is typically small, often less then US$20/year.

The OLPC project is a way of stretching that money, by delivering a tool that can read many things, updated, freely, throughout a community. It will focus attention on children and education in their communities. The children will have, for the first time, a tool they can use to make their own materials, to share with their peers & parents & teachers, and to pass on to the children after them.

I'd have thought the /. community would understand the importance of access to tools one can learn with, build with, get into and interact with, finding other folks passionate about the same areas of interest. What has driven /.'ers also drives developing world children.

It's an experiment. But it's an experiment based on solid research that has gone on before it. The goal is not usurping funds for other priorities but building on local and international resources to provide the children with a multiple use tool that can they & their communities can use to directly address their educational needs.

I know it is asking a lot of some /. posters, but before mindlessly posting with complaints about what you think the OLPC is about how about investing 5 minutes into going their websites and learning about the research that has gone before it and the thinking that has gone into it.

Oh, and this isn't only for developing world children, also the children of Massachusetts.