One Laptop Per Child

BY: NICK IANNITTI  |  Fuel Buzz

When so many creative minds come together under one roof, ideas and discussions are bound to emerge that skew slightly from our daily tasks. While the bulk of these discussions involve cartoons, movies and video games, it is not above us to delve into more resonant subject matter from time to time. One such discussion has led to one of Fuel’s latest ongoing projects.

Much of the work we do involves creating bridges between the digital world and ideas that, until recently, happened strictly offline. The Internet and digital content are becoming ever more enmeshed in our society, so using technology as an educational tool for children is far from a nascent concept. Yet, it’s easy to forget that computers are not as widespread as the internet would have us believe. There are roughly two billion children in the developing world who are either under-educated or not educated at all. Most of them have never even touched a computer. While a host of organizations have long been focusing on improving quality of life and education in developing nations, only a fraction of those have focused on providing children with computers, a tool that we often take for granted.

The fact is, when compared to books and other basic educational tools, computers are a luxury–and far more expensive, something a simple stipend for education can hardly cover. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) disagrees. Founded by Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT computer scientist, in 2005, OLPC wishes to put an inexpensive but powerful tool in the hands of every child who could not otherwise afford one.

OLPC began on the notion that, while computers are not necessarily getting much cheaper on the whole, what you receive in a low-end laptop today is much more than you would have gotten five years ago. So OLPC asked “for $100 today, could we make a laptop with the specifications of five years ago?” MIT computer scientists said “yes.”

So they did. The XO laptop is not just an inexpensive laptop. It’s an stylishly designed computer which brings a lot of technological innovations to the table, and is specifically created to work intuitively with a child’s natural desire for exploration.

When Fuel heard that OLPC was inviting developers to contribute software to the project, it triggered ideas in our creative team. While we may not be experts in housing, farming, or nutrition, we are experts in creating engaging interactive content and communicating through games. If we talk about “choosing our battles,” this is definitely one battle we are in a position to help fight.

OLPC is relying on volunteer organizations to provide the educational content, and so Fuel decided to participate by volunteering designer and developer time to create a pilot set of educational activities for the XO laptop, which is aimed at children between 6 and 12. The emphasis is to create programs that will make learning fun, regardless of language. By focusing on basic skills like counting, mathematics and language, and by using intuitive symbols that don’t rely on any specific language, the aim is to make our programs customizable by teachers of any region to reach as many nations as possible.

Since the XO features both a webcam and a microphone, there are endless possibilities to how children will be able to record and share their experiences with others in their community. For instance, imagine a game where children had to match the sound of a word with its image. We could provide the interface using a pre-determined set of symbols and images (which would remain the same in each country), but teachers in each different language zone could use the microphone to record the respective sounds which applied to them, making the experience “translatable” as it were.

With our experience in developing games (many of which have been aimed at children), we really hope to be able to make a significant contribution to world education through the power of digital media. We’re hyped to work on this project, and the plan is to keep bringing news on our progress, so stay tuned. Also, since this is a volunteer project, we welcome any suggestions if you have any experience in teaching and would like to share some ideas for learning activities.

Until next time!