Tag: olpc

OLPC Dead

OLPC can’t claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot.

olpc dead, basically.
2018-04-17: A postmortem.

To kids who grew up around smartphones and tablets, OLPC’s XO design looks hopelessly outdated. “If their parents happen to have even a low-cost smartphone, they’re more interested in that than the laptop.” But the device is tougher than a cheap Android tablet, and its unique design makes it harder to steal. Users can rely on Sugar’s development community to maintain the software. And unlike a phone or tablet, it’s custom-built for making things, not consuming them. “We’re constantly looking out for any sort of alternative. And to date, we have not found anything that compares.”

SimCity donated to OLPC

The goal is to renovate it and take it in new directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about education, Alan Kay’s about oo programming, and many exciting ideas about blogging, game mods, and lessons learned from WoW, The Sims, Spore, etc

2007-11-30:

The goals of deeply integrating SimCity with Sugar are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s work with Logo. It should be easy to extend and re-program SimCity in many interesting ways. For example: kids should be able to create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like Logo’s turtle graphics or Robot Odyssey’s visual robot programming language!

heh. it appears the OLPC may be the best (last?) chance for alan kay’s ideas to be implemented at scale.

OLPC implications

when you give a kid a net connection, access to wikipedia and to the rest of the world, things change fast. Things you wouldn’t necessarily predict. Like a 10 year old who can diagnose his dad’s illness. Or a farmer that can ask his daughter to find out where to get a new part for the tractor.

ie, the OLPC

OLPC Gmail

Questioner: “Is Google trying to get all these kids to sign up for Gmail?” Presenter: “Um… Google’s not trying to do it. We went to Google, and said, “Do you mind if we give Gmail accounts to all these kids and violate your service agreements?”