One Laptop Per Child News

Oscar Becerra Tresierra, head of the Directorate General of Educational Technologies (Digete) of Peru's Ministry of Education, announced 100% XO laptop saturation for Peruvian school children by 2011.

"He recalled that in the fourth stage of "Una laptop por niño" (OLPC by its acronym in English), the Ministry of Education issued in this year, 230.705 laptops and will encourage the teaching and learning of 718.499 million students 16.412 and 85.413 teachers in educational institutions in all departments.

At the end of this stage, "one laptop per child" will be distributed for free, about 550,000 nationally modern computers, in the context of improving equity and educational quality of public school students, Oscar Becerra detailed.

But before you celebrate, realize that OLPC Peru is having the same teacher training issues as Rwanda. How do you scale OLPC teacher training nationally with consistent quality? As Carlos David Laura of Peru's Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), found in a survey, teacher training is uneven across the country:

Laura surveyed three schools in the south of the country that were among the first in Peru to receive the laptops. He found some teachers had never been trained to help children use the computers. Peru's Ministry of Education has provided only five hours of training to some teachers, and many of the schools in the programme are in remote, rural villages, making it impossible for untrained teachers to ask for help.

His survey also found that educational achievement has not improved. Student grades haven't changed and their level of knowledge was still below the national average.

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Last week, India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal spoke of the possibilities for a $35 tablet for Indian students. In response, Nicholas published the open letter below in the Times of India. You can read it also in Spanish, French, and German.

One Laptop per Child applauds Minister Kapil Sibal for promoting a $35 tablet. Education is the primary solution to eliminating poverty, saving the environment and creating world peace. Access to a connected laptop or tablet is the fastest way to enable universal learning. We agree with you completely.

Please consider this open letter OLPC's pledge to provide India with free and open access to all of our technology, and our experience with 2 million laptops, in over 40 countries, in over 25 languages. As a humanitarian and charitable organization, we do not compete. We collaborate, and invite you to do so, too.

In the meantime, let me offer the following six suggestions:

1. Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation's most precious natural resource.  For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.
2. Your tablet should be the death of rote learning, not the tool of it. A creative society is built not on memorizing facts, but by learning learning itself. Drill and practice is a mechanism of the industrial age, when repetition and uniformity were systemic. The digital age is one of personalization, collaboration and appropriation. OLPC's approach to learning is called constructionism. We hope you adopt it too.
3. Tablets are indeed the future. OLPC announced its own eight months ago. However, caution is needed with regard to one aspect of tablets: learning is not media consumption. It is about making things. The iPad is a consumptive tool by design. OLPC urges that you not make mistake.
4. Hardware is simple. Less obvious is ruggedness, sunlight readability and low power. We use solar power because our laptop is by far the lowest power laptop on the planet. But do not overlook human power - hand cranking and other things that kids can do at night or when it rains. Just solar would be a mistake. Rugged means water resistant and droppable from 10 feet onto a stone floor.
5. Software is harder. Linux is obvious, but whatever you do, do not make it a special purpose device with only a handful of functions. It must be a general purpose computer upon which the whole world can build software, invent applications and do programming. We know that when children program they come the closest to thinking about thinking. When they debug, they are learning about learning. This is key.
6. More than anything, of all the unsolicited advice I have to offer, the most important and most likely to be overlooked is good industrial design. Make an inexpensive tablet, not a cheap one. Make it desirable, lovable and fun to own. Take a page from Apple on this, maybe from OLPC too. Throw the best design teams in India behind it.

India is so big that you risk being satisfied with your internal market. Don't. The world needs your device and leadership. Your tablet is not an "answer" or "competitor" to OLPC's XO laptop. It is a member of a family dedicated to creating peace and prosperity through the transformation of education. In closing, I repeat my offer: full access to all of our technology, cost free. I urge you to send a team to MIT and OLPC at your earliest convenience so we can share our results with you.

Nicholas Negroponte
Founder and Chairman
One Laptop per Child Foundation
Cambridge, Massachusetts
USA

This was first published as Welcome: $35 Tablet for Education

Back in May we published an article called "How to learn when 53 percent of XO laptops are broken?" which led to some interesting discussions as well as some people becoming quite unhappy with olpcnews. The core of said story was that a report from Uruguay indicated that more than half the XOs in the school that had been sampled were in an unusable state. I think it's needless to say that such a high number of failures - if it turned out to be true on a big scale that is - would be quite scary.

Hence one of the objectives for my time in Uruguay was to get a better idea of just how many XOs really are broken. Needless to say that I don't really have any new and conclusive numbers to share but after talking to several people, from inside as well as outside Plan Ceibal, I think I at least have somewhat of an understanding of what's going on.

The numbers

According to an official report which received quite a bit of media attention last week 14,2% of the XOs in 275 surveyed classes at 55 different schools (out of more than 2000 schools participating in Plan Ceibal) where unusable due to some form of breakage. An additional 6,2% of XOs was currently undergoing repairs and hence unavailable for the children. Together with machines blocked by the security system or a full Journal (3,9%) and ones where the state was either unknown or something else (3,1%) this means that 27,4% of the XOs weren't in a usable state.

What the numbers mean

Given that the report states that it worked with a representative sample of schools both in as well outside of Montevideo I'd say that the numbers are likely to be a pretty accurate picture of the state of XO breakage in April 2010. However admittedly without further data about the surveyed schools it's hard to say just how representative the sample really is.

Another interesting bit of information that I almost missed is that the XOs in the interior of the country were in most cases handed out in 2008 whereas the schools in Montevideo received their XOs throughout 2009. While not being the single cause of the lower number of functioning laptops outside of Montevideo I would assume that the extra year of usage is one of the core factors here.

The report also points out that a number of measures have since been take to deal with the issues. Among them are:

• setup of call center that's available from 8AM to 8PM
• increase in the number of Ceibal Móvils (the mobile repair-teams that offer repair services at schools around the country)
• reducing the price for repairs that aren't covered by the warranty (e.g. a keyboard replacement currently costs ~$10 and a display replacement ~$20)
• decentralization of repair facilities
• workshops focused on how to take care of XOs

It remains to be seen whether these measures have the desired effects but reading things like this blog entry (talking about XOs being blocked by the security system due to them not being able to access schools' WiFi networks and hence unable to renew their activations leases) and speaking to some people it became clear that more needs to be done. For one the call center hotline is only free to call from landlines but since a lot of Uruguayans use mobile phones (from which the call isn't free) with the combination of having to wait in line for several minutes is seen as making it unnecessarily hard to get the repair process started. When I inquired about this with Plan Ceibal I was told that starting in August calls from mobile phones would also be free and that efforts had been undertaken to have more calls answered in less than 30 seconds. Another thing they're working on is to display the call center's number during the boot-up of the XOs which I personally consider to be a great idea.

Additionally some of the rules that govern whether parents need to pay for the repair of an XO or not are rather arbitrary. One example is that keyboards which have more than 10 keys missing have to paid for to be replaced. Yet as I know from personal experience it only takes very little time (as in a couple of days) to go from a keyboard with one missing key to one where a dozen keys are missing.

The fact that only about one in three broken XOs is currently undergoing repair clearly indicates that there's a significant barrier to entry to that repair process. This is particularly surprising given that the repairs themselves seem to be handled very efficiently with Plan Ceibal claiming that all machines sent to their repair centers are returned to the owners in no later than 5 days.

More importantly however the majority of the measures described in the report relate to the repair process when really more attention should be paid to ensuring that the XOs don't get broken to begin with. This strikes me as somewhat odd as there is a clear understanding, both inside as well as outside Plan Ceibal, that the social environment is a key factor when it comes to the breakage of XOs.

Realizing this some of the RAP Ceibal groups have started organizing information events for parents before their children receive XOs. I had the chance to attend one of these meetings and the topic of how to take care of the machine as well as emphasizing that this was a tool for learning and not a toy was greatly emphasized. The volunteers I spoke to estimated that in the past similar talks seemed to half the number of broken XOs in some of the communities they worked with. Yet it seems clear that these volunteer efforts can only go so far. Plan Ceibal has apparently started work in this field as some particularly critical schools now receive visits from a team consisting of technical as well as educational staff. However I do feel that a more comprehensive outreach to all parents and teachers should be very high on the agenda of Plan Ceibal.

I will definitely keep an eye on this topic to see how things in Uruguay develop over the course of the coming months as well as speak to people in Paraguay and Peru about their experiences when it comes to XO breakage.

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OLPC has already spread across some 40 countries. More than 2 million children are learning with the help of its laptops named XO. In India, however, while various states have approved the project and are piloting it, the central government has not taken a pro-active stance to roll it out and thereby letting 96% of Indian children remain generations behind the rest of the world. I have heard three main hurdles to it: 1. Its not cheap enough

At some Rs 15000 including taxes spent over 5 years, or less than Rs 10 per day per child, its still too expensive: I suggest, its less than a third of what the government schools spend on education and less than 1/20th of what private school charge and less than 1/100 of what higher end school charges and less than 1/1000 of what the American school costs in India.

If the government wants to think like a fixed-income employee, there is no solution in sight. If the government thinks like an entrepreneur, we can cover every child in 5 years and create a nation of people who can explore their potential in the times we live in.

As Satish Jha was quoted, OLPC India would like to support any initiative of the Indian Government to bring down the cost of delivering quality education to its poorest. Then why is Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) hell bent on attacking One Laptop Per Child? The announcement of the MHRD showcasing a $35 laptop is intriguing to say the least and designed to spite OLPC.

Initially MHRD dismissed OLPC saying the "pedagogy of learning with laptops is suspect". Then it went on to announce a $10 laptop that turned out to be a magnified USB, instead of the regular 1x2.5 cms it was 12.5x19 cms in size and added a functionality to see the file names.

That announcement embarrassed India in the world community. The new announcement may suggest that someone in MHRD does not get the message that India has no track record of product creation and all such announcement have achieved one thing: depriving 25 million children that enter the school system every year of an opportunity to learn the way the developed world learns for a percent of their cost.

Indian minister for HR Development HRD, Kapil Sibal announces $35 tablet project. It seems to be based on the Freescale i.MX233 system on chip, with a 7″ resistive 800×480 touch screen. Here's my video with AllGo Embedded Systems, a R&D company based in Bangalore India, where they are showcasing their $35 tablet reference design at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando last month. This is likely to be the tablet that India's HRD Minister is talking about:
The Bill Of Material is as following:

• ARM9 Processor: $5 (Freescale i.MX233)
• Memory: $3
• WiFi B/G: $4
• Other discret components: $3
• Battery: $5
• 7″ 800×480 resistive touch screen: $15
• Total bill of material: $35

It is of course an honor for me that the Indian Government watches my videos and bases their Government projects on those. I just wish India's HRD would stop attacking the One Laptop Per Child efforts all the time.

Last week, India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) announced a $35 tablet computer and listen to how The Wall Street Journal describes it:

"This is real, tangible and we will take it forward," Kapil Sibal, minister for human resource development, said at a press conference in New Delhi. The touchscreen tablet will cost about $35, or 1,500 rupees, when it hits markets by early 2011.

The device was developed by students and professors at India's premier technological institutes, using open-source programming, according to the Associated Press. The Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Mumbai, Chennai and Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore researched it in collaboration with the government-operated National Mission on Education.

Before you start foaming for a $35 iPad, realize that this is another grand pronouncement from MHRD that follows a familiar path.

Two of this week's articles were written right there
Even if I were to spend my weekends writing articles non-stop - instead of eating tons of asado, talking all things olpc, *and* writing articles - I couldn't possibly put all my olpcnews South America road trip experiences and thoughts into readable blog posts. Already now, after only two weeks of traveling, my paper notebook is overflowing with notes, diagrams, and drawings that could probably be the basis for two dozen 500 word articles. So while I'll obviously do my best to cover the most interesting findings of this trip I'll probably not be able to satisfy the curiosity for all things olpc that our diverse readership is has been demonstrating over the past few years.

ceibalJAM - the content and software focused organization which I described in more detail in Tuesday's article - has organized an event called miniJAM! artístico to take place this Saturday, July 24, between 2PM and 7PM. The detailed program has just been published and I'm very excited to have the opportunity to give a talk introducing the efforts of the European OLPC and Sugar communities as well as share a little about last year's experiences volunteering with OLE Nepal. Additionally there'll be an introduction into robotics controlled by XOs (really can't wait to see that!) as well as a workshop focused on how to make stop-motion animations with Scratch.