I live in Argentina. The OLPC came to Argentina to promote the project, at the same time as Uruguay our neighbors. The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no adopt it was incredible.
In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks.
I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics (e.g. the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in Latin America the education system). While technology is an important driver for change, if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough. Sadly companies like Microsoft and Intel understood that it was easy to convince corrupt politicians to buy the machines without a substantial change of the status quo: win-win for the companies and policy makers, but a loss for the future of children.
> A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology.
Disclaimer: I worked on early software for the OLPC (had an original dev board) for a group that (long after I left) went on to win the Global Learning X-Prize [1].
I actually think the issue with the OLPC not achieving its goals is that they focused too much on the hardware and not what software was on the device and the learning outcomes the software delivered for children. The classic "here's some tech go figure out what to do with it" approach doesn't work. There was more interest in teaching to code and open software rather than basic numeracy and literacy. Content is king here.
That's why initiatives like those of the winners of the Global Learning X-Prize[1] have shown measurable impact on learning outcomes.
We started playpower.org to build 8bit learning software for existing $10 tv-connected computers because it seemed like the OLPC didn't get that the market would happily make dirt cheap hardware, but wouldn't produce the software. At the time, we thought an open-source approach could work for content production, but gradually shifted into a for-profit funding mechanism. We still contribute to open source education (such as one of the global xprize finalists) but see our best work in helping commercial education companies produce better digital experiences. It is slow, incremental and often frustrating (working with textbook companies), but the scale of impact is enormous.
Bottom line: market forces can easily support cheap hardware but not support educationally effective software (since edu markets don't pay for efficacy)
I work in education technology as well and I definitely see what you're saying. There is always a focus on more and more tech... but content remains shitty across the board.
Youtubers are lightyears ahead of content providers in the education industry.
> I actually think the issue with the OLPC not achieving its goals is that they focused too much on the hardware and not what software was on the device and the learning outcomes the software delivered for children.
I worked with some of the early OLPC hardware as well, and I absolutely agree. The software which shipped with the OLPC was strangely designed and half-baked (at best!) -- the user interface was bizarre, many of the advertised features were unusable or barely usable, and there was an inexplicable lack of basic educational apps on the system. Most of the value of the OLPC in an educational environment probably came from its web browser and word processor, which were simply wrappers around Firefox and OpenOffice.
> The classic "here's some tech go figure out what to do with it" approach doesn't work.
Actually I think this does work, many us on this forum learned this way. It's just a shitty general purpose approach to intentional education. I think this would have been fine had they been able to sustain the project and someone else could have tackled the problem a different way. It seems like there was nobody with the right vision to attract money.
It also just was not clear what problem it was solving.
I disagree. Access to understandable technology is more important than content. These are not mere content delivery devices. Unfortunately, decision makers are poorly informed, and people are lazy, and prefer something already polished over a box of pointy tools.
Seems like there was a perennial disagreement (which is continuing today) about the degree to which OLPC was meant to help teach computing, or a curriculum, or just give students and teachers some tools to do parts of what they were doing anyway in a higher-tech way.
Edit: I particularly appreciate bryanwb's comments on autodidacticism at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047351, which point at a fourth possibility: the idea that just having access to computers is good for kids.
Yes, this is true. I don't mean to say better software wouldn't have helped--I think OLPC was killed by a combination of factors. (Not least the early trajectory of its hype cycle.) But better software alone ... I don't think it would have materially changed the outcome in any way.
Sorry, but I have to challenge your authority. You're saying "measurable impact on learning outcomes" and then linking to same site which doesn't give any evidence of this. As far as I can tell, these prizes are being awarded by people who are all in the same social circles and even their peer reviewed papers don't seem to carry serious outcome analysis. The whole Nicholas Negroponte-Epstein-Ito scandal just shows these people are not interested in the outcome. Again, as he self-described himself "a rich white guy", Negroponte didn't suddenly wake up and care about the welfare and education of children in the third world, nope, not believable, as shown by his subsequent actions.
Negroponte and his gang of destroyers went from developing country to developing country intent on destroying simple proven-to-work schemes and replacing them with his costly OLPC. He knew that local NGOs desperate requests for funding would be bypassed in favor of his large contracts which could be utilized by bureaucrats to hide corruption.
I'm sorry that you wasted your time working on the software. I was tasked to work with the XO-1 and it was an utter waste of our time. We'd have been far better off if those funds had been spent on providing vaccinations, and lunches at school which have been proven to have a vastly better long term outcomes than a underpowered unconnectable amd-geode board with a wonky unusable pixelqi LCD.
Honestly, when I first heard of OLPC, I was so excited by all the claims. I remember they sent us screenshots of MIT engineers designing a pulley type charger and they told us the OLPC would run for hours from a few minutes of pulling. It was all fake and total marketing BS. Honestly, after the OLPC, my respect level for MIT Media Lab went down the drain. I realized these people aren't really significantly different than a reasonably educated grad student in a developing country. They just use their accents and mannerisms and social circles to get themselves perceived as being capable of delivering something superior, when in reality they delivered a barely passable netbook. The whole Joi Ito-Epstein pedo scandal has further reinforced my opinion. Developing countries would be better off not buying into the whole MIT aura as it does not seem deserved. It is sad that MIT continues slurping funds from developing countries to do jobs-for-the-boys club type projects. I had thought better of such an institution but I was completely wrong.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that it was a lost for the future of children, but I'm all in for saying that it made no difference.
I have 3 daughters between 25 and 18. The 3 of them received a netbook from the plan.
My father was a teacher both at secondary schools and at a university at the same time that the program developed, and he was a serious and dedicated proponent for the use of the netbooks on class; so, I kind of have a first hand experience on 2 sides of the dice ;)
From the side of my kids, it was just a way to be able to connect to the internet 24/7, with absolutely no effect on their academic performance (I'd dare saying it had a negative effect; not trying to diminish my responsibility, but it was rather difficult as a single father to policy 3 young girls while at the same time the example set on the contrary by their friends was rather strong: Most father would just let the kids use the computer all day, as that meant not having to care for them).
My father, on the other side, was an island in a sea of apathy from the people that were supposed to drive the change.
I think the biggest issues with the "Plan Conectar" were mainly four:
- The government on average thought was that it was enough just to drop the computers in the kids' lap.
- There was a big disconnect between the main drivers of the program and the "lower ranks" of the educative establishment.
- A HUGE percentage of the educative workforce was computer illiterate, and both passively and actively rejected the program.
- When the program was crafted, it was not visible defined (Nor there was anybody / anything actively defining it nor enforcing it) who's responsibility was to implement the program from the top to bottom, so basically everybody's attitude was "Not my responsibility".
I'm friends with the person that was responsible for the program from the whole of my province, and I know for a fact - I even once applied for a position with them - how much of an effort they were doing for the program, and how excellent they were at doing that. I'm also aware of how much of a fight they were presented against, and how it felt like a lost cause from them start.
> - The government on average thought was that it was enough just to drop the computers in the kids' lap.
An relevant quote on technology and education [1]:
> You might have said "What is the role of computers and bicycles in education?" Then I would have said, "Why the bicycles?" and you "Why the computer?"
Efforts like OLPC seem to start from wrong place: presupposing that access to technology will be good for education and then figuring out how to solve that, rather than looking at what educational issues actually exist and determining the problem from there.
I really like that quote, not sure why you left the juicy part out ;)
Yeah, I think basically the problem stems from thinking technology is an end instead of a medium; and even for those that do see it as a medium, they are not quite clear how it fits the education environment.
In the end, we should first try to focus on fixing education - that, from my point of view, is a process that is utterly broken everywhere - before shoving in there something like technology.
Ey thanks for sharing your experience. I appreciate your perspective as a father.
My experience is from the teachers training side: as part of the University of Buenos Aires, I taught programming classes to high school teachers.
I think that having a computer is much better than not having it. It makes no difference for kids with access to computers, but there are kids that doesn’t have that. For those kids it may do a difference.
My main complain of the “Plan Conectar Igualdad” is about the cost of incompetence. As you mention there is a lot of capable people that wants better education, but when resources are not very well aligned and plans like this are at the risk to die in each economic down turn, I wished a much better approach rather that giving the netbooks and wait for a miracle.
Yes, totally agree here. Obviously was far from my experience (In my house there've been for years now more computers than people, and that's not even counting cellphones). But I couldn't agree more with what you are saying: For an incredible lot of kids was not only the first contact with a computer; it was also completelly unrestricted.
Regarding incompetence, I think there was some sort of desconnection from reality from a lot of people in key places: I think way too many people thought that just dropping the netbooks would be enough (Like in Ethipia) without even considering cultural and social constraints.
It still baffles me that it is heralded as a success by a lot of people from the previous government; yet, I think that the move by the current government to scrap it completely - instead on making the effort of fixing the problems - was utterly stupid.
There was a lot of energy, effort and knowledge by a lot of incredible hard working and knowledgeable people put into making them work.
Also, I never gave them much of a cursory look, but I think the machines were _really_ configured to be a powerful assistant to education: It's demise in the end was mostly due to - failed - politics... Just like with socialism ;)
"Conectar" was my introduction to computers. When I was a teenager I felt that some people were really making an effort to bring new opportunities but many didn't appreciate it, like teachers who couldn't figure out configuration stuff and just dismissed the effort by the government and personnel who worked in the program because they thought We (many poor children in the "Interior") wouldn't have any kind of curiosity about them. Don't misunderstand me but I used to heard things like "No entiendo para que lanzaron este programa si estos chicos nunca van a ser programadores o van a trabajar de éso"... Of course I can talk about it, It just wasn't about throwing computers to us and expect us to hack our way to success. I think that by mid 2020's Argentina will have much more literate computer users and many people with more expertise in a variety of things, and with that new context We will do better by recycling good ideas and reviewing mistakes from the past.
"...yet, I think that the move by the current government to scrap it completely - instead on making the effort of fixing the problems - was utterly stupid..."
Yes, they should have tried to improve the program. But they didn't, the current government it just marketing. They really disappointed people.
I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology.
I suspect 1/100 or 1/500 or some similar number of people will be extraordinary autodidacts and, if you give them sufficient baseline education and an Internet-connected computer, they will get extraordinary results. I've worked on numerous 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) proposals that were supposed to get computers and the Internet in US schools from 2000 onwards. That effort has largely succeeded and not been a panacea.
I'm an "autodidact" programmer so I feel like I should discount myself as an outlier in this discussion, but I'm amazed to see my kids just spending time on their computers at age 4-5. They are learning really complex problem solving in Minecraft, learning to sound out words when searching the inventory for items, and learning a little geometry when trying to predict the right coordinates to teleport to. They learn fluent English with an advanced vocabulary automatically too. I love to watch it and it reminds me of how I engaged with computers as a kid too.
They learn all this stuff independently on YouTube tutorials. I just join in their games and play along and ask for help when I get stuck. Or help them with sysadmin tasks like installing the "mods" they want to try.
So I feel like my kids are living the dream and engaging with computers in a positive way, regardless of whether it improves their grades in school, and to me the purpose of OLPC was to spread this self-directed play-learning opportunity much more widely.
Isn't everybody a bit of an autodidact in the age of YouTube, podcasts, blogs, and forums?
At the time of the program in many areas of Argentina it was rather internet was not really widespread enough.
And when the kids would go in the internet would be either to play Counter-Strike or log into Facebook, that was taking over the world at the time.
> if you give them sufficient baseline education
That didn't happen. I think even 1/500 is too optimist.
Anecdotally, there were some security measures implemented in the netbooks in Argentina that would require periodic re-enabling (So as to prevent kids for quitting school?) and the only "smart" thing I saw coming out of the netbooks was kids finding out how to circumvent those measures (That in this age and time means just googling it)
> The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no adopt it was incredible.
At that point in time, the OLPC was perceived as an existential threat to Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, to Intel. Intel because it had nothing that could be used in them (which was solved to some extent by netbooks and Atom processors). For Microsoft, it meant a whole generation of kids could grow up having never used Office or Windows, something that Microsoft would not be able to counter unless OLPC failed.
Brazil was pretty much the same. They made an incredible effort to push Atom-based computers running Windows that had none of the more interesting aspects of the OLPC - not the sunlight-friendly screen, the mesh network, the software for group activities, the openness to tinkering...
I don't think the OLPC team realized its mere announcement would be a declaration of war. They'd need Intel's buy-in (at least to cut Microsoft lose) and they'd need to quickly mass-market the tech through someone like V-Tech in developed countries to get funded through hardware licensing and financial commitment to get software and content developed.
Then they could properly scale up to government level and demonstrate the Microsoft argument that the kids wouldn't be prepared to join the workforce (and enjoy the Microsoft lock-in) was void.
Now, imagine the colossal power it would be to be able to help shape the content kids all over the world would use to learn. I would expect the US government to get interested in that, but it didn't.
I think there was a missed step between the original concept and the step to productionization. Recent scandal aside, MIT's Media Lab has been a pivotal force in technology, but sometimes the world at large isn't ready for pivots. In this case, fighting both Microsoft and Intel (with the full benefit of hindsight) was unfortunately and ultimately foolish.
My outsider perspective is parts of the Media Lab had an ivory-tower, idealized view that Thinkpads running Linux are the proper way to compute (no judgement, I still believe that), thus the OLPC should resemble that, but childlike. One route to productionization would have been to move the platform to existing expensive Windows(/Intel) laptops after the first production run proving that a $100 BOM was quite possible. Moving to Windows laptops would have been a very large compromise to the original project's high-minded, ambitions goals, but one that would have preserved the project. The Windows kernel and Explorer isn't open but that wouldn't have prevented porting the Sugar interface to Windows and kept the main UI software goals of the project open source and editable/"compilable" directly on the laptop.
When we make plans, we often forget about the possible failure scenarios - What if we fail at making the hardware? What if someone else makes it better? What if the software can't be built? What if governments don't buy it?
It feels like they didn't have enough Plan B's for when their Plan A's failed.
> A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics ... if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough.
It is hard enough to get good projects going, especially something involving hardware. They have to think about funding, manufacturing, shipment, spreading the word out ... In addition to these, if they also have to think about politics - especially against those with insane resources like Intel or Microsoft, it is almost an impossible fight.
It says a lot about our society as a whole that good projects face such miserable odds
I worked on the one laptop per child project for three years of my life. I co-founded olpc Nepal and its succeeding organization OLE Nepal together with rabi karmacharya who is referenced in the article. I was also co editor of olpc news for a time. It was a great experience if not altogether successful. The most problematic aspect of olpc IMHO was that it was dominated by male autodidacts who looked down on professional educators. Ole Nepal from the very beginning worked very closely with Nepali educators.
Rabi continues to do great work and I am rooting for him. You can find out more about OLE Nepal here http://www.olenepal.org/
Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have any learnings from mitigating it.
Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop.
It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this process was often underestimated.
To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids were struggling.
>every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop
So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was underestimating the role of teachers the main problem?
Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?
> went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out
I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems obvious to me: successfull autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably most societies...) tend to be internally motivated, so higher proportion of them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn most from human teachers they physically interact with!
If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of "influencers", you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African villages is low!
By targeting the self-learners you're basically going anti-viral... you're doing anti-marketing! You'd need to try and hit the "micro-influencers", and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community leaders and local "celebrities".
We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies after they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most underdeveloped societies today totally lack that kind of useful networking ...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!
no == there, not that strong of a claim, just "if [A], then more likely [B] than without prior [A]" ...if you have endless time (or a few PhD students you can task to research literature for free) and patience search for studies about "associations between [A] and [B]" dig and dig through things.
I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...
Ahh, so you are making these claims because you think they are true. You presented them as some sort of fact by stating that this is obvious to you. I just don't really get why it was relevant to lay out that chain of relevance. I don't see the obvious connection between self motivated and introvert, but I guess it could be possible. The other connections just seem like random thoughts. I was trying to figure out why something so obvious to you doesn't explain itself when presented without evidence...
We had to show results in a short period of time and focus on the top priorities of the parents and teachers which boiled down to belong their kids not fail out of school in the early grades.
You can focus on nurturing autodidacts but you will never have more than a handful of anecdotal successes in the short run at best. And you need more than anecdotes to keep educational projects alive. Further, educators run the school. If you want an educational project to be successful, You live and die by their support.
as an observer from the sidelines (i was contributing to the OLPC development but never involved in any deployment) my guess is this: if there was a proper theoretical constructionist framework then it failed because of the resistance of the existing educational system.
in other words, a constructionist model may work in a situation where kids are left to themselves, but it may not work if there is a competing educational system that doesn't allow the kids to take advantage of the opportunities the constructionist model provides.
personally though i am skeptical that a pure constructionist approach will enable the children to achieve their maximum potential, and any successes of it are in comparison to a failing traditional model.
There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places.
EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels:
>SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors.
It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.
>[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]
Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design":
Here's an unboxing video of the SimCity Classic "School Edition" Lab Pack, which includes the teacher's guide by Doreen Nelson and Michael Bremer:
LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview
An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.
Thanks for digging out the links on Doreen, pocketed both.
But am I reading GP wrong that it wasn't constructionist education proper that failed, but a "let's do things with laptops" being retconned onto constructivism?
at the time i had the impression that not much thought was given on how to implement education using the laptops. looking at it now, i have the impression that the expectation was that the mere existence of the laptops would allow for constructionist education to happen all by itself.
i don't know enough about constructionist education to know what factors ought to be present, but i can't imagine that an education system and teachers that do not understand or do not want constructionist education aren't a problem.
i also believe that OLPC didn't sell constructionist education to the buyers, nor that the buyers wanted to start using constructionist education.
i have the impression that it was rather hoped that constructionist education would not only happen by itself but also undermine the existing education system in that it flourishes despite the existing system.
in the end the failure was that the expectations of parents, teachers and others in the education system were not met.
one might argue that the failure was to not educate the buyers on what to expect, but then i can't imagine that OLPC would have successfully sold anything if they had tried to sell constructionist education along with it.
It's not straightforward just how to apply those theories, and takes a lot of experimentation and adaptation. And getting the established education system to change is a Sisyphean task.
Instead of thinking of SimCity as a way of directly teaching urban planning, or financing, or building construction, you can use it to motivate and indirectly develop language, logical argument, and debating skills. You can ask students to write about their cities, by describing their aspirations, proposals, platforms, campaign promises, then promoting and defending and discussing the issues, then holding elections and voting for which plans to implement, then implementing them, then discussing and writing about how they turned out.
I don't have personal knowledge of the project, but it was very heavily constructionist (or they said it was - can't comment on the implementation) so if you look around it should be easy to find talks and papers about their approach. Lots of links from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist
>Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.
The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones.
Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware:
>Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep).
We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that.
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold.
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold:
I may be alittle late to the party here but came here to thank you for your service back then it was all for a good cause even if things didnt go as planned.
+1 with the thinking that content was a big problem as well
Things like wikipedia & khanh academy offline in-a-box and translated into local languages like they have now would have been a better direction of effort for OLPC in general.
Sliding offtopic, but do you have any more memories around this specific collaboration? I'm deeply familiar with the theory, but anecdotes on such an ambitious project would be useful to a text I'm working on. Thanks.
I provided Chaim Gingold with a bunch of emails and code as material for his dissertation, which he analyzed, wrote about, and quoted in the sections about SimCity. He also interviewed other people who told sides of the story I had not yet heard.
Please send me an email (contact in my profile) and describe what you're interested in, and I'd be glad to answer questions, dig stuff up, and forward it to you.
His dissertation is long and detailed (as those things tend to be) but well worth checking out! Especially all the great stuff about Doreen Nelson's lifelong work.
I don't have a direct pdf link, but if you prod and jiggle it a little bit, this pdf viewer will let you download the entire pdf:
PhD in CS dissertation on "Play Design" by Chaim Gingold, June 2016, UCSC.
>>> I co-founded olpc Nepal and its succeeding organization OLE Nepal together with rabi karmacharya who is referenced in the article.
The project looks very interesting. I'm a 35-year veteran developer looking to maybe volunteer my services, and would like to have a chat with someone about how I could perhaps help out. I just sent them an email, but do you still have contacts there?
Thing is, I'm going to be in Kathmandu for 4 or 5 days from Wednesday this week, and Pokhara after that, so if someone would like to have a sit down and a chat, I'd be more than happy to do that.
I'd say OLPC did change the world in a myriad small ways, just not in the big lofty way they imagined.
As other commenters mentioned, it was a direct inspiration for Asus eee PC, which spawned an entire category of netbooks and ultrabooks. I wouldn't be surprised if indirectly it also was a part of inspiration for iPads and Android tablets by letting Apple and others realise there's a strong demand for sub-notebook consumer "computers".
As another commenter mentioned, Raspberry Pi was also in part influenced/inspired by OLPC.
And on a personal note: around 9 years ago I was working on (porting some Linux software to) a touchscreen-capable netbook directly inspired by OLPC. In my spare time, frustrated by the lack of touchscreen-friendly drawing apps I built a small web app to scratch my itch. Several years later, it's used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, many of them teachers and kids in elementary schools.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people out there with similar stories to tell.
> As other commenters mentioned, it was a direct inspiration for Asus eee PC, which spawned an entire category of netbooks and ultrabooks.
I'd say they were late to the table with a sub notebook design as Toshiba released the Libretto in 1996. Then there were those weird Windows CE mini laptop organizers in the 90's as well. Sharp Wizard, etc.
Wasn't the Toshiba Libretto more like a $2000 laptop? <g> With the Windows CE 'organizers' not that far behind? Sure, hardware was a lot more costly back in the 1990s, but still. (And how could you forget to mention the Palm NetBook?)
From my recollections, the OLPC foundation never set out to create the subnotebook. Size was a factor because of the intended audience, but design considerations such as cost and power consumption were much more important. Contrast that to subnotebooks of the era for western markets, which tended to be rather expensive.
Those were not the only technical design considerations. Durability, sunlight readable screens, and protecting children from theft and surveillance also come to mind. Very few of those things were factors in the subnotebook market that preceded or followed, except for cost. In all likelihood the OLPC drove the development of other low cost portable computers.
>As other commenters mentioned, it was a direct inspiration for Asus eee PC, which spawned an entire category of netbooks and ultrabooks. I wouldn't be surprised if indirectly it also was a part of inspiration for iPads and Android tablets by letting Apple and others realise there's a strong demand for sub-notebook consumer "computers".
Seems like a lot of people forget about the netbook "revolution"
If you've never used one it's hard to describe just how awful this machine was. The keyboard, the screen, the processor and worst of all the software. And I say that as someone who really wanted it to work and really wanted to use it with children to help them understand computing.
> Major PC vendors spend millions in research and development to enhance a computer's usability; OLPC tried to reinvent the wheel and came up with an oval.
That was the main problem. The project was always based on a colonial and patronizing attitude. Don't give kids the real thing, so they can learn how to use Excel spreadsheet (some real CV item), but rather give them custom hardware and custom software that nobody would want to buy somewhere else. God forbid some kid could accidentally learn how to use some proprietary software.
Instead, they could have just put their PixelQ displays on some ruggedized X86 laptops produced in China or Taiwan and put some good Linux and tons of books on it.
The ironic thing is that it's still near impossible to get a laptop with a fully sun-readable screen anywhere, neither in developing nor in industrialized countries.
If they had skipped all of the custom interface design and simply shipped a standard Linux desktop, maybe with a custom launcher and a few custom educational apps, they could have saved years of development time and put the devices in front of students much sooner.
That's Mitch Bradley's Open Firmware Forth, which was also on Suns, post-NuBus PowerPC Macs, Pegasos, and IBM Power Systems!
I used to call it "L1-A Forth", because that's the Forth you got when you pressed "L1-A" on a Sun keyboard to get into the boot monitor. He also made a great version of that Forth system with a metacompiler that ran under Unix (Forthmacs), which I used a lot.
i got one too, and for years if was my primary portable work device as a programmer only to be later replaced by a the 1.5 model which i used until 2 years ago!
sure, the webbrowser on the first model couldn't open more than a handful tabs before getting bogged down due to lack of ram (the 1.5 model could open a few dozen tabs or so), but other than that it was a capable and usable device.
the keyboard was made for kids, not for touch-typists. i am not a touch typist myself, and so for me the keyboard worked perfectly fine.
the screen was actually awesome. the dual mode where you can turn of the color and get a high resolution black-and-white screen made working outside a blast. the famous dream of working by the beach, i did that with an OLPC because on any other laptop i would not have been able to see anything because the sunlight was to strong.
A $100 smartphone beats 400$ netbooks from 2008 in terms of hardware. 1920 x 1080p full HD display, an 8-core processor with 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage.
I used a 2008 eee PC exclusively for all personal computing needs for about two or three years (web browser, videos, music, chat and programming in python, C++ and clojure), running Arch Linux. The only thing I didn't do on it was play games and I had a desktop in the office for professional work at the time. It worked perfectly fine. Hell, I miss it sometimes.
The problem is the difference between the aspirations and the reality. ZX81s did exactly what they were expected to do, the way they were expected to do it. Netbooks were almost universally bad. There were very few reasonable scenarios where they did what you expected them way you expected it. I have owned a Lenovo S10e for a decade now and have yet to find one of those scenarios.
In 20160-2017, I did the final year of my CS major using nothing but an IBM Thinkpad X40 (1.1 GHz ULV Pentium 4, 1.25 GB RAM). It was quite adequate. DrRacket, CompuCell, LibreOffice, Gimp, VirtualBox, it all worked fine. Such a lovely machine...
I did absolutely learn how to zoom out on the web, so many dialog modals would have off-screen buttons with no scrolling. It's still a pet peeve of mine to this day that I test with any modals.
I also used a chromebook for a few years... tbh, I only went back to a rmbp because I needed better VPN support where I was working... Of course, I generally avoid taking it with me anywhere, I use my work laptop at work (docked) and my desktop at home.. or my phone for the most part.
I have. Besides reading on the ferry (a netbook's screen is much nicer than a phone's smaller screen), and using the Arduino IDE, with a USB-to-serial converter it was also useful for configuring networking equipment.
I really did ton of work on MSI Wind. All kinds of work, even maintaining old Delphi codebases. Granted, it had probably the best keyboard of all netbooks of that time and most time I worked with external monitor.
I 'struggled' to use a Asus netbook for about 3 months, trying to use it as my daily driver for work. I was OK for notes and writing docs but not much else. Even web back in 2012 was terrible on it. ANd the keyboard was lame.
I started on windows, tried various Linux and ended up with Jolicloud on it, which was about the best I could hope for - but soon got a real laptop, and regretted wasting my cash on the netbook.
I used a EeePC 701 for a few months. I found it perfectly fine with Window Maker, though the keyboard was awful - but it did work and i'm not a big keyboard snob anyway so i just went with it.
I was able to play old games, chat on IRC and read the occasional web page (though only one page at a time) and even watch videos. That latter part was a bit annoying though since i had to transcode most videos to a lower resolution and simpler codec, otherwise the CPU wouldn't be able to keep up (i do not think there was any video decoding acceleration). This usually meant that if i wanted to watch a 30m video i'd had to wait around 2 hours :-P. But i allocated time for that, doing transcoding while sleeping or going out.
Sadly one morning i destroyed the screen by stepping on it - i often used it at bed and left it at the side and one morning i stepped on it when i woke up. I later bought an Acer Aspire One as a replacement - that one was much faster (though some video still needed transcoding) and it had a much better keyboard. Sadly i lost it by forgetting it at a bus station.
Recently i bought a used EeePC 701 from eBay for a few dollars. It is in almost mint condition and instead of Linux it comes with Windows XP. I find it funny that at startup the OS always complains about the resolution (800x480) being too low despite being the native one :-P.
> Recently i bought a used EeePC 701 from eBay for a few dollars...
That's the nice thing about those netbooks still - they're available used for a few bucks (a lot less than $100!) often in very good condition, and a mainstream Linux distribution will run fine on them, even booting from SD card storage (which a lot of modern hardware will fail at)! Sure, you do need 1GB RAM and quite a few gigs of storage space, so the original eeePC 700 series is a no go, but everything else in that class works reasonably well.
We do see projects like pmOS that aim to do pretty much the same thing for modern mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), but the difficulties there are huge due to all the bespoke hardware - there's just no comparison.
I think older netbooks such as the 700 series could find a new use either as IoT or VoIP terminals and other non demanding tasks, by fitting them with just the bare minimum OS to run a single full screen application. Not that different from the LibreElec distribution whose motto is "just enough OS for Kodi".
Example: a 701 paired with an external good quality audio card plus Jaaa [1] might become a small useful standalone instrument for audio alignment (generator + spectrum analyzer).
11-12'' screen notebooks offer the best of two worlds: portability and performance. I wouldn't trade my X240 Thinkpad for anything else as it takes (bag included) less than half the space in my motorcycle topcase, and the dual battery runs it well over 8 hours.
It has a nasty hardware problem though, as it completely freezes down to requiring a cold reboot if I grab it with my left hand in the empty space left of the trackpad, but it appears other Thinkpads share the same problem as well. However after some years I had absolutely no problems in normal use.
I don't think that is a defect of thinkpads at all. something is clearly broken in your particular machine. Is your hard drive located in that spot, loosely connected, and perhaps not connected at all when you squeeze it right there.
Fair point, though Netbooks where smaller than that here is a Dell Mini 9 with a fairly generous 8.9” screen, but many where even smaller. http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/dell-inspiron-m.... The Eee 700 for example was 7”, but some where down in the 5” screen’s.
By comparison you get a 6” 1920 x 1080p screen on a 100$ ZTE ZMax PRO.
Is a smart phone really the best way to type an essay or create a computer program? I do see the movement towards touch-only devices in younger people, but I'm yet to understand how people can productively type on such devices.
You can easily connect any cheap USB or Bluetooth keyboard if a lot of typing is required. Of course you can't use such a setup while walking around somewhere, but usually you also don't write essays in these situations.
A smartphone is definitely not the most efficient way to type an essay, but I'd bet that many commenters here are composing responses on a smartphone while on the go. There's an adage for cameras that applies here - the camera you have on you is better than the camera that's sitting at home (caveat: assuming you're not at home). It's more than a little inconvenient to pull out a laptop to compose a response here while, eg waiting on the bus. Comments here reach essay length, and sure, it would be nicer to use a full size keyboard, but I'm on my smartphone already.
Additionally, it's worth watching how fast the younger generation that was raised on smartphone keyboards can type - some type impressive, though I've never measured wpm. Then again, I'm at the equivalent of index finger pecking on a regular keyboard on my smartphone's keyboard.
From what I've seen of the samsung desktop/docking options, it's pretty cool... looks like it'll be in android proper before long. As long as I can SSH and/or RDP to something beefier, I'd be happier docking my phone at work.
It was what could be built for the money. I was ok with the cheap keyboard. The processor could have been sufficient if there hadn't have been such a focus on python. I got one through the G1G1 program and managed to get some decent work out of it.
This used a collection of existing Linux programs and a few I made myself. I built the Desktop widget engine, The physics doodle program, and made a NPAPI browser plugin that ran sandboxed x86 code (since it was evident that the CPU wasn't up to flash, I explored other ways to get active things running in-browser).
Note at 2:17 I run free to show the resources used for the desktop with Firefox running.
I also made a graphics library to use a video overlay to display scaled graphics so that you could render lower resolutions and scale to fullscreen. The Geode could drive a rgb565 video overlay with free scaling which meant you didn't have to push around the super high resolution of the XO-1 display when you wanted things to move swiftly.
Python seemed like a good idea at the time, in the days before Python 3, with its rich ecosystem of extension modules and extensible applications and framework integrations and web application servers, especially because it was so widely used educationally (and on the way to replacing Scheme at MIT and other schools); while JavaScript hadn't quite made its ascendency yet.
Sugar's plan was for Python programs to access web functionality and integrate dynamic html and JavaScript via the xulrunner Python extension. But in the end, the xulrunner Python extension was not well supported, was extremely complex, and had lots of overhead.
Sugar was build on top of the Cairo graphics library, like xulrunner (Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox) and GTK were, so at least they shared the same 2D rendering library.
Cairo (the moral equivalent of html canvas 2d context) was a great choice of 2D graphics library at the time, both for the browser and for Python, because the OLPC XO-1 hardware didn't have a 3D graphics accelerator (so WebGL was out).
But Sugar then went on to use GTK via Python (using a complex GObject/Python adaptor bridge), and built a thick sweet syrupy layer of object oriented graphics and user interface gobbledygook on top of that.
It was a mish-mash of way too many competing object systems (GTK objects + Python objects + Cairo objects + xulrunner objects + Sugar objects).
At first, I simply ported and polished the old TCL/Tk/X11 version of SimCity to Sugar, by making a tiny Python wrapper around it to launch and kill the TCL/Tk app under control of the Sugar desktop user interface (with some metadata to give it a name and an icon on the Sugar desktop).
My next more ambitious goal was to rewrite SimCity's TCL/Tk user interface in Python using Sugar, but Sugar was just not ready yet.
But the PyGTK/Cairo stuff was solid and efficient. So I simply refactored SimCity into C++ classes, plugged them into Python with SWIG, and made a pure PyGTK/Cairo user interface that ran on Mac, Windows and Linux, instead of a Sugar-specific interface. So I could at least make some progress while waiting for Sugar's GUI API to gel and mature, which never really happened before I had to stop working for free and do something else to pay the rent.
The original TCL/Tk version of SimCity supported multiplayer, but I had to disable it for the OLPC, because it used hard-to-set-up insecure X11 networking, not suitable for kids. And the sugar mesh network invitation rendezvous stuff wan't ready yet (or worth reimplementing in TCL/Tk just for SimCity).
To implement a modern multiplayer version of SimCity (now referred to as Micropolis), instead of using X11, it made much more sense to run the simulation as a web service and the user interface in the web browser.
So I develop a Python/TurboGears/SQLAlchemy based back-end web application server, plugged the C++ MicropolisCore simulation engine into the web server with SWIG, and made an OpenLaszlo/Flash/AMF based front-end user interface, because Dynamic HTML, WebSockets and WebRTC were't quite ready yet.
Now days the JavaScript ecosystem is mature enough to implement the user interface and networking without proprietary crap like Flash and AMF (in fact Graeme McCutcheon has rewritten the entire simulator and user interface in JavaScript).
...Eventually JavaScript started running a hell of a lot faster than anyone expected, then Flash died, xulrunner withered on the vine, while dynamic HTML, canvas, WebGL, and WebAssembly finally matured, and node.js and Electron happened, JavaScript evolved, the tooling and library ecosystem expanded like a supernova, and JavaScript took over the world. But that wasn't what most people expected to happen 14 years ago in 2005, when Python was on its way to ascendency as both a general purpose language to replace Perl, PHP and Java, and an educational language to replace Scheme.
In retrospect, if we could restart from scratch today, Sugar could have been written entirely in JavaScript, on top of something like xulrunner or Electron to access the operating system, and the entire system and many applications could have been programmed and scripted in JavaScript instead of Python.
But then Sugar would have to compete with the myriad of other JavaScript pointy clicky user interface frameworks out there, on its merits. And while it had some great ideas and nice designs, it also made a lot of huge design and architectural mistakes and bad trade-offs.
Redesigning a friendly graphical internationalized localizable user interface for children from the ground up is a gigantic fractally complex long term problem, and Sugar bit off of a lot more than it could chew and optimistically overpromised, even if it were built on top of today's software and hardware.
But there are still some great long term evolutionary projects that were adapted for the OLPC and have migrated or been reborn to run in the web browser.
By now, Squeak and Scratch and Snap! all run in the web browser: both in an emulated Smalltalk VM written in JavaScript (squeakjs [1]), and also Scratch 3.0 [2] has been rewritten entirely in JavaScript. Snap! [3] was originally written in JavaScript from the ground up, and has all the power and generality of Scheme, that Scratch left out.
If the plan was to have something nice performing on the XO-1 then I would have gone with something like FreePascal, It existed, The compiler was fast, friendly to newcomers, and the final code is much faster than anything Interpreted. JIT gets you speed but at the cost of memory. Remember it only had 256Meg.
Similarly, Having used Cairo on the XO, I saw no evidence of hardware acceleration, and was significantly slower than other software renderer I tried. I used Imlib2 which was massively faster. I would have preferred a much simpler graphics library that was specifically designed to support the 2d Acceleration that the geode provided. Fewer features but everything fast.
I played the original StarCraft on a machine significantly less powerful than the XO-1. It managed a smoother GUI with Sci-fi looking transparent panels sliding in. The power was there but abstraction threw it all away.
The outside, retroreflecticive screen mode whose name I forget was really nice and I'm sad it's not available on _any_ device currently. It was much closer to feeling like reading an eink display but none of the refresh delay.
I also got one through an employer that supported "Give One, Get One". Fantastic idea, but I never really figured out what to do with it. The UI looked like it was headed somewhere really interesting, but it wasn't clear how to get there.
My son did use it to play some games at some point, but to learn programming, Minecraft's redstone system turned out to be far more attractive.
I think the biggest failure (ignoring politics, markets, etc) was its complexity. Tech with moving parts tends to break. You also can't easily build something that is all things to all people, it's better to do a simple thing well than a lot of things awfully.
If I were to set out with this challenge today, I would build a basic version of the Pi Top [1]. Literally just a keyboard, touch screen, Raspberry Pi, battery and battery circuit (input 5-24V DC, output 5V DC). A lot of people in hard-up areas still have phones and therefore some kind of DC power, but worse case a car battery can usually be come across.
Put the Pi behind the display (avoid bending the display cable) and expose the inputs/outputs. Put the battery in the keyboard area to weight it down. Have everything just plug into normal ports (including the display) with visible cables on the back.
That way it's simple, easy(ier) to fix and upgrade. Parts can be hacked and re-used for other projects. There's tonnes of documentation and online support. People could feasibly take to broken devices to create a working one.
As for the meshing stuff, it's overly complicated. I think you would just preload the machine with a bunch of learning resources (software, books, etc) and make it easy for the device to become a hotspot for file sharing.
What you've described is nearly exactly the design of the OLPC. A one-piece impermeable keyboard, battery behind the keyboard to weight it down, all of the sophisticated electronics behind the screen to minimize cable bending.
The charging circuitry will charge the battery if given anywhere between 11 and 18 volts (there are user reports of slowly charging with 9V), and will not be damaged if exposed to higher, or negative, voltage. I've charged mine from my 12V lithium motorcycle battery plenty of times.
The OLPC XO-1 is quite easy to disassemble and repair. You only need one philips #1 screwdriver, and it doesn't have a ridiculous number of teeny-tiny screws, or any glue, holding it together. The wiki has detailed instructions on disassembling the top[0] and bottom[1] of the laptop, and also guides on replacing specific components.
People took advantage of the easy-to-disassemble and thoroughly-documented hardware to develop community hacks. A popular one was to replace the membrane keyboard with a particular USB keyboard, which could be cut up to fit the chassis, and internally wired to one of the USB ports. I've seen a tutorial on how to solder an extra 256 MB of memory in.
The G1G1 laptops came with a preinstalled collection[3] of educational material, mostly from Wikipedia. The wiki has instructions on how to create custom collections to be distributed with a deployment of laptops. OLPC also created the School Server[4], a distro intended to provide a central network resource for communication and stored learning material.
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to reply. In your opinion, specifically regarding the hardware, do you believe there are improvements that could be made (in terms of design)?
> What you've described is nearly exactly the design of the
> OLPC. A one-piece impermeable keyboard, battery behind the
> keyboard to weight it down, all of the sophisticated
> electronics behind the screen to minimize cable bending.
Kind of, but it has speakers, daughter extension boards, swivel display, custom "motherboard" PCB, etc. I do appreciate that it was a different time though and I have the arm chair privilege of looking at this through a modern lens.
> The charging circuitry will charge the battery if given
> anywhere between 11 and 18 volts (there are user reports
> of slowly charging with 9V), and will not be damaged if
> exposed to higher, or negative, voltage. I've charged mine
> from my 12V lithium motorcycle battery plenty of times.
These days (modern lens) I think it would be appropriate to accept an input down to 5V (i.e. USB). Supporting AC wouldn't be incredibly difficult either (many phone wall changes are quite small), but of course would increase size and/or complexity. Also I think it's good to keep kids away from high voltage/current AC.
> The OLPC XO-1 is quite easy to disassemble and repair. You
> only need one philips #1 screwdriver, and it doesn't have
> a ridiculous number of teeny-tiny screws, or any glue,
> holding it together. The wiki has detailed instructions on
> disassembling the top[0] and bottom[1] of the laptop, and
> also guides on replacing specific components.
It's certainly much better than I thought in terms of repair-ability, but I still believe it's overly complex. The display for example should get a display signal via a HDMI cable (which is shielded) and send the touchscreen data via USB, as well as providing power for the display. If the cable breaks, sourcing a replacement is relatively easy given the standardization. If the display breaks, an external one may be used.
> People took advantage of the easy-to-disassemble and
> thoroughly-documented hardware to develop community hacks.
> A popular one was to replace the membrane keyboard with a
> particular USB keyboard, which could be cut up to fit the
> chassis, and internally wired to one of the USB ports.
> I've seen a tutorial on how to solder an extra 256 MB of
> memory in.
That's awesome, but it should have come with an off-the-shelf drop-in removable USB keyboard anyway. The keyboard should be a valuable item, even if the rest of the laptop is completely destroyed.
> The G1G1 laptops came with a preinstalled collection[3] of
> educational material, mostly from Wikipedia. The wiki has
> instructions on how to create custom collections to be
> distributed with a deployment of laptops. OLPC also
> created the School Server[4], a distro intended to provide
> a central network resource for communication and stored
> learning material.
The preinstalled collections are pretty cool. The school server I highly doubt would have worked correctly in many cases as it relies on too much to work correctly (server setup correctly, networking, stable electricity supply, etc).
These days I would make all the books stand-alone, probably distributed as markdown as you can read them raw or compile them into some more pleasing format. I think requiring some non-standard program to open .xol files was probably a move in the wrong direction.
In my view humans built on top of failures as much as on success. I see following things which were propelled by OLPC:
1. No frills cheap laptops like EeePC, I don’t think computer manufacturers would have tried cheap laptop if its not for OLPC.
2. Rise of google chromebooks which are the results of number 1. And today are considered better than a tablet as a device which helps creativity among kids not just consumption.
3. Focus on educational content more than the technical details of a device. This we learned only through the failure of hardware centric approach and I believe it works for both developing and developed world students.
Hopefully we can learn from OLPC and build new initiatives with focus on good content along with device today. Also can introduce kits using micro-bit, and rPi like SBC with physical projects where student can deploy all 5 senses to create and learn new things.
I think the importance of the OLPC was that it showed that a general computing device could be assembled for a BOM of around $100. It was an extraordinary challenge that tackled the growing concerns around the "digital divide". It didn't succeed and that's okay, because it reset expectations of what cheap general computing could be -- tolerable and good enough. It definitely paved the way for later experiments like netbooks and the rPi.
I think one of the very overlooked experimental parts of the OLPC was the innovative attempts to finance it via the buy-1-get-1 project. I think that was also an experimental failure as well, but showed there was a demand among techies for cheapo computing devices they could tinker with.
The Raspberry Pi project seems to have learned a ton of hard lessons from both OLPC and the UK's previous dives into educational computing in the 80s, synthesized them and become wildly and unexpectedly successful. Which drives to the point that maybe the OLPC would have been more successful had it just been generally available on the market at say $110 per unit.
For point of reference. The Raspberry Pi Zero has better compute specs than the original OLPC did for $5. I wonder what kind of "laptop" could be assembled for a BOM of say...$35?
> The Raspberry Pi Zero has better compute specs than the original OLPC did for $5. I wonder what kind of "laptop" could be assembled for a BOM of say...$35?
It'd be hard to get a usable display, keyboard, battery, and power supply at that price point. The Pi Zero neatly bypasses all four of these issues by having the user provide their own. :)
The Raspberry Pi project seems to have learned a ton of hard lessons from both OLPC
I tend to associate the Raspberry Pi much more with the Arduino movement. I know they marketed it as a cheap PC for the masses, but IMHO that was more to just get press coverage. In practice you pretty much already need to have a PC on hand to download and burn the OS image to an SD card. The alternative is to buy a grossly overpriced SD card with the OS already on it, which completely defeats the purpose of buying a cheap PC. I really haven't heard of any movement of the RPi making PCs available to people who didn't already have one.
>Bender thinks OLPC might have struck more deals if it had focused less on technical efficiency. “Every conversation we ever had with any head of state — every time — they said, ‘Can we build the laptop in our country?’” he says. “We knew that by making the laptop in Shanghai, we could build the laptop [to be] much less expensive. And what we didn’t realize was that the price wasn’t what they were asking us about. They were asking us about pride, not price. They were asking us about control and ownership of the project.” OLPC had created a computer that could withstand dust and drops, but it hadn’t accounted for political messiness.
which is rather ironic because Free Software and Open Hardware Designs are all about control by the users. the specs and everything was there, so letting countries build their own would easily have been doable (ignoring what the country needs to do to implement that). having a dozen countries build their own could have had some interesting effects.
"While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives, not just with the XO-1."
They bottled out of Linux, so no free OS . . . the rest is history.
True, but in my experience having worked for a school district and for a tech college, there is nothing teachers hate more in the entire world than having to revise curriculum. At the tech college, the IT instructors rewrote their curriculum every year out of necessity, but instructors in other areas were just like pretty much all the school district teachers I knew: if a button changed position they were upset because they'd have to revise their instructions that tell kids to click on the 'the third button from the left' or some such nonsense.
At overly busy tech startups where time is money, it's more than just the "hassle", it's time that takes out from doing other work. There must be screenshot automation suites out there, but the education department is often woefully understaffed, under budgeted, and near last on the list of priorities that it is a laborious, toilsome, and thankless task, often without notification to the eduction team, which results in less-than professional presentation when the first time the change is noticed is in the classroom or when a customer complains. It's no wonder that it's upsetting when things are changed!
Microsoft got a cut-down version of Windows XP to work on the XO-1. When word of that came out, lots of people were very upset at OLPC, because of how heavily they had been emphasizing the open-source aspect of the project.
IIRC, it never got farther than a tech demo, and no laptops actually shipped. It still generated bad press for the project, though.
Eben Upton was partially inspired by the failures of the OLPC project - he could see how it was indulging all sorts of tech whims and reinventing everything possible, rather than providing an effective solution using proven tech.
That's too bad. I bought an XO through the "Give One, Get One" program. It was a great device for kids to learn with. It had built-in microphone, speakers, camera. You could display a sound wave like an oscilloscope.
One subtle point that is difficult to convey is that the OS was highly optimized for power consumption. It would suspend execution in micro-increments to prolong battery life. That's important if you have to manually crank a generator or pedal a bike to make power.
Those kinds of features are not available in the laptops used by developed countries.
> you probably remember the hand crank. ... Designers dropped the feature almost immediately ... because the winding process ... demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare.
Maybe something other than a $100 would be more life changing and improving if you're circumstances are such that winding a crank is too much.
It did change the world. The OLPC project launched the netbook industry - before OLPC, cheap laptops cost ~$1000, afterwards you could get them for $400. Now you can get cheap netbooks/tablets with a lot more functionality than the XO for under $100.
It's just that it's not specifically the OLPC's laptop that changed the world.
I think that what went wrong was a complete ignorance of market mechanisms. Visionary head of a non-profit organism says he's going to benefit humanity by providing cheap computers for kids in the developing world. He's right about the supply chain, and completely wrong about the market, and the response of the other players.
I remember when the OLPC came out there were reports that the first thing recipients were doing was going on E-Bay to sell the computer they'd just received and buy food. OLPC tried to quash the secondary market with the "buy one, give one" program. They succeeded in creating a Western market for cheap notebooks. Other manufacturers (Asus, etc.) succeeded in delivering better machines for that market, which is unsurprising given their manufacturing expertise. Once those better machines existed, the initial target market bought them instead.
They succeeded in breaking the cartel that was keeping laptop prices > $1000, which I've got to give them credit for. Much of the rest of the story is just hubris in thinking they could deliver a better machine than companies that had spent decades optimizing their manufacturing and quality control processes.
(There is perhaps a similar story in Tesla, which succeeded in getting everybody to pay attention to electric cars, but will likely fail to maintain its position within the changed market.)
Computers are not generally useful for a classroom
To try and be useful you must also have significant education for teachers and have significant maintenance budget.
We know the "Sugata Mitra’s famous Hole-In-The-Wall" failed, and we knew that years ago.
Turning down Windows and Mac support which rich people use is insulting.
The concept people would steal the OLPC (The reason for the color) is dumb, but unstoppable anyway, so the fact for years they wouldn't sell OLPC's to developers and hobbyists because of this imaginary blackmarket, shows the lack of thought and also the total arrogance to pretend it was "open".
It was well known at the time it came out people in the communities needed mobiles phones and radios. But it just wasn't sexy enough for NGO's. The whole industry is a scam designed to be just barely enough to get the next round of funding, this project just further supported this systematic structural flaw.
>Computers are not generally useful for a classroom
I kind of agree with that. There seems a bit of a common problem with charitable 1st world people building things for 3rd world countries that they assume some distorted idea of what they want when they probably did school with pen, paper and books themselves and that's probably what works elsewhere. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africar - people in Africa don't want wooden cars - they drive Toyotas and similar, just often beat up ones. Usually what works in poor places is the same as what works in richer one but a bit lower budget.
> some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives
Haven’t found a screenshot of Sugar OS in the article, but I assume it’s not that different conceptually? Still files, apps, windows?
it really is quite different. it centers around activities (which are apps effectively) but it has no windows, only fullscreen, and you can only open one activity at a time. to open another you have to close the current one.
the state of an app is logged to a journal. to continue work that you did before you go to the journal to pick up the state that you are looking for. by default you get the apps last state, or you can choose to open a new fresh state.
so for example you open the paint activity. first time you get a blank canvas. next time you get your last drawing. or you can select to create a new drawing. or use the journal to pick out an old drawing.
Not on the surface? In the shell you have select "activities" that you can choose, and if the "activity" you chose is a standard linux app, or a explorer-style application (i.e. I remember I was still able to run Nautilus?) you would see file structure.
But you would be able to use it without encountering "a file" or "a folder".
I remember window management being minimalistic, apps went full-screen, there might have been a switcher.
Remember, this was a low power computer with limited memory, for children, and getting it into the hands of those children as soon as possible was paramount. So, naturally, the user interface had to be alien and written completely from scratch in Python. Existing user interface paradigms were obviously a non-starter. Time-tested ways of doing things were not applicable. Children are not going to understand concepts such as background tasks and multiple windows. Have you ever seen a child try to use a real computer? They just don't get it. Everyone knows this.
A parent or even school system in a rural state couldn't buy them at all. If you weren't one of their projects, you didn't matter. Their G1G1 was just rubbing salt.
The refusal to sell the laptops to hobbyists (beyond the short-lived G1G1 program) and first-world school systems was apparently motivated by problems managing expectations for the low-power machines. G1G1 resulted in a large number of complaints and support requests from people who expected a commercial-grade "laptop", and the foundation was unwilling or unable to deal with them.
That said, I think ignoring the first world was an enormous misstep. Under-funded US schools would have benefited immensely from OLPCs, and a large domestic demand for the devices would have helped scale up production, reducing cost and increasing availability for poorer countries as well.
The 'Tesla model's as it were. Sell high end sports cars to enthusiasts first and use that to fund further development. Next a luxury sedan, where profit margins are higher, before moving down to the cutthroat economy market (a step that Telsa is still yet to fully realize since the promised cheap Tesla is still unavailable). It seems to have worked for Tesla.
Oct 2005: “Remember that a key part of our strategy is to create a situation where even if Nick rejects us for philosophical reasons there is a long and visible history of our attempts to work with them and then we have to ask to get a license for the "open source hardware" and we will make our own offering on the commercial side.” Craig Mundie
I don't think giving kids iPads will make the mediocre education system any better or for that matter something like Khan Academy (more of a supplement).
But there are several companies in China and India doing e-learning but with actual teachers and online tutoring involved.
Raspberry Pis with a recycled TV that has HDMI input and an old USB keyboard and can get someone up and running, often for under $100. (There are a lot of old TVs around!)
I would have killed for the handcrank during the G1G1 days, but it turns out it wasn't _completely_ vapourware. I finally saw a working one at Linux SCaLE 17x years after the fact, so I'm assuming some small number must actually have been produced.
It wasn't practical, but I still love the concept.
i think the handcrank was an after-market product, created long after the OLPC project had realized that it wouldn't actually work.
or rather, what wouldn't have worked is a handcrank built into the devices, as the stresses would break it, whereas a handcrank mounted separately on a table, connected to the laptop by a cable, doesn't have that problem.
right, and there were several places that built foot powered chargers. actually, i remember thinking that whoever actually built that handcrank did it more for the novelty value than to actually solve a problem.
FWIW I bought one when G1G1 was still around ... I used to use it for Skype, which actually worked pretty well.
Pulled it out of storage recently and my 6 year old daughter enjoys playing around with the music apps. I also installed FakeNES. It works, and you can map the screen-side buttons, but unfortunately they don't seem to want to work at the same time so it's terrible for actually controlling.
Incredibly, the battery still holds a charge, but only for about an hour or so.
I had the dev board before there was a keyboard, or screen. It had some kind of very different Python driven GUI. My task was to make Wine run on it, but I never got too far. First, I never spent enough time on it, but it also had some kind of very weird boot loader I never quite figured out. I think it had some kind of lock or signature scheme, which was very odd at the time. (When PCs were PCs and had BIOS, not EFI.)
That's right! It's the Cadillac of Forth systems, with electric windows, cruise control, luxurious Corinthian Leather upholstery, a retargeting metacompiler, and emacs key bindings for command line and history editing.
I have an OLPC, bought at $7 at a thrift store. It appears to come on but screen doesn't light up. Is there anywhere that these can get repaired? I'd like to have a working one for historical purposes.
I suggest OLPC was a high-risk startup attempt at a window of opportunity for a shoestring MVP bootstrap of an open-source open-education-resources chip-to-society-full-stack path to rapid global-scale transformative change against hostile opposition. And that it could have worked.
I don't know what I can usefully say here. Then, as now in OP and comments, there's much confusion. So start there.
It's ~2005. OLPC is using the available computer-supported community discourse tech - Wikimedia, mailing lists, and IRC. And it's not enough. Especially with shoestring human resources, and having to be semi-closed due to intense opposition. The press is its usual confused. But so are professional communities which needn't be. In an alternate universe, there's an extra developer-relations person, so Guido is a champion instead of clueless, and the python community doesn't fail to engage. Today, discourse tech still sucks. A postmortem on humanity may read "the software engineering community wasn't incentivized to create tools to permit sanity". It'd be nice to improve on that.
What else... Be careful over-simplifying your strategic story. "Jump to scale or fail" helped focus scarce resources on navigating the one chance of success. No need to worry about things that will "just happen by themselves" once scale occurs. Scale can be assumed, as either it exists, or you don't. And if the jump is clean and discrete, great. But in the mushy messy have-we-jumped-yet fingers-on-the-edge case, having organized for that regime can matter.
What else... It seemed the prospect of broad impact was pulling in science folk who otherwise wouldn't be creating open-education content. And a recent MIT cell-biology VR project, which for domain expertise pulled in researchers for interviews, mentioned one challenge was getting them to leave. So if some other new opportunity generates similar interest, it may be possible to attract more and better such resources than is obvious, or presently utilized. It's hard to overstate just how bad even the best of current science education content is. Perhaps AR will enable such opportunities.
Ah well. One challenge teaching history, is conveying its contingency. How easily the world could have been a very different place today.
A last thought, just for perspective: It's easy to forget the cost of delay. 350k people were born today. 2.5M last week. And this. They will most all be in school 6 years from now. Schools that are pervasively wretched. What can you do to help change that? You've 6 years. Tick tock. It's a pipeline, so if your transformation takes an extra year, you miss a cohort of 130 million kids. 4 years costs half a billion. Tick, tick, tick...
And it's not a "them" problem. Setting up an analogy, Mexico average high-school graduates can look like average US high-school dropouts. So if your transformative change makes them look like average US hs graduates, like awesome wow! But... average US high-school graduates? Pity the transformation wasn't just a little bit greater. And so if you tell me your transformative change will give every US high-school graduate the grasp of science of an average entering Harvard freshman, well, like awesome wow! Great for societal equity! But... Harvard freshman? Pity their science education is still failing them so very badly.
John Negroponte makes Jeffery Epstein seem like a saint in comparison. It's no wonder Nicholas still doesn't see anything wrong with taking Epstein's money.
I've checked and updated the broken links from the criticism section of John Negroponte's Wikipedia page, and fixed them in Wikipedia too:
John Negroponte's Human Rights Record Continues to Stir Debate (May I Speak Freely Media - extensive list of links to critical commentary and news articles, etc., February 2005)
>Negroponte was born to Dimitrios Negrepontis (Greek: Νεγροπόντης), a Greek shipping magnate and alpine skier, and grew up in New York City's Upper East Side. He has three brothers. His elder one, John Negroponte, is the former United States Deputy Secretary of State. Michael Negroponte is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. George Negroponte is an artist and was President of the Drawing Center from 2002 to 2007.
As long as Nicholas Negroponte was in the business of white-washing people's horrible reputations in exchange for cash in proportion the the number of innocent lives they've ruined, he could have at least hit up his own brother for a few trillion dollars. That would have bough a lot of $100 laptops, or even built a lot of laptop factories.
In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks.
I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics (e.g. the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in Latin America the education system). While technology is an important driver for change, if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough. Sadly companies like Microsoft and Intel understood that it was easy to convince corrupt politicians to buy the machines without a substantial change of the status quo: win-win for the companies and policy makers, but a loss for the future of children.