OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

I went through my entire school and undergraduate college without once bringing my laptop into the classroom. My mother and father learned to program in FORTRAN using nothing but pen, paper and the occasional slide rule.

Paper books, decent sized notebooks and ballpoint pens. Spend $100 on that. That will actually help. This whole project was solving a first world problem in the third world.

A laptop is a great tool for studying. Word Processing makes editing papers much easier than the old markup and rewrite method. The web makes researching topics and cross referencing documents much easier. Nothing beats actually running code for learning how to program.

If I was going to spend $100/yr on educational supplies for a student I wouldn't spend it on a laptop. Pencils, notebooks, and textbooks are more important. If I was going to spend $1000/yr on educational supplies for a student I 100% would include a computer.

Pencils, paper, white/blackboards, books, chairs, desks, walls, windows, electric lighting, HVAC systems, and even clothing are all “technology”.

One of the problems with providing charity in Africa is the ridiculous amount of superstition that pervades every aspect of African life. If we can remove one or two of these superstitions, then uplifting African society will be so much easier (perhaps it is ethnocentric of me to assume that African society wants and/or needs to be uplifted, maybe that's why the program failed?).

There was a video posted a while back where the students of a South African university were mad that they weren't learning about magic. Yes, magic. They had "seen magic" in their villages and were upset that the university was teaching them that magic wasn't possible (It didn't help that the lessons were coming from white people, but that's another issue).

You can't fix adults when they get all the way to university with those kinds of superstitions, you just need to start on the next generation and hope the lessons stick.

It seems really reasonable to have laptops off during instruction periods, have them on for some labs, and use them to help with homework.

If someone could make a robust laptop for $100 I could easily believe in it being a net gain, even if it was only ever used for reading textbooks.

I'm someone who gets distracted very easily, so my compromise was blocking websites that caused distractions during class so that I could focus on annotating class powerpoints rapidly.

The cheapest way to give 100 books to someone in the third world is to give them a laptop (and a way to power it.)

Also, for most of their target audience, the laptop would be the brightest source of light in their home.

This image, in particular:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm

So, no, don't think of it as a "laptop," it's just an educational device in a laptop form factor.

That said, I had major problems with how OLPC executed on that vision.

The classroom was one of the biggest distractions to learning I faced. Early access to a computer was not only the foundation of my productive education, I don't exaggerate when I say it may have saved my life.

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Books-NCERT/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A97...

Okay. Google study technology interferes with learning and do some reading.

If you personally know you're going to spend most of that time in the classroom going on Facebook or Twitter, then you should have the self-control to not bring your laptop to class.

And everyone should have self control, optimal intelligence, etc. But that's not how the world works.

As for Facebook and Twitter, how about the 20 minutes spent in every trig class making sure that everyone's TI-82 was set to radians and not degrees, and running around the class addressing errors caused by typos? That's time that could be better spent on classic analysis. What about the complete rabbit's hole that is Wikipedia?

I doubt it. Have a look at these prices[0]. The most expensive books do not exceed ₹150. A 100 of those costs ₹15000. $100 = ₹6500. Plus add the power source. You get very close to ₹15000. And as we saw, $100 was nowhere near enough to make a good usable laptop/educational device. So you need to spend more. And that is when compared to Amazon! Buying books wholesale (or printing them) will be even cheaper.

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Books-NCERT/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A97...

The superstition that is prevalent is one person believing neighbors and relatives are bewitching them or using them somehow to fuel their success. Having come from such a background, that has not stopped my education. Secondly if you spent 1 hour in any African village, you would realize how highly people think of their own governments, white people and people from towns. The challenge we have is that due to corruption by our own people (who the multitude trust) who fail to bring us the books, pens and pencils, we fall victim to the west's kindness and sometimes propensity for such uninformed nonsense as you have written above.

Also, absolutely no one would take any of those South African students seriously, it's a joke. We are not as backwards as you think. Unless you also believe thoughts and prayers will stop your mass shootings.

Lastly, the west's general belief in the superstitution of praying to a guy who was nailed to a cross then resurrected after 3 days seems NOT to have had a negative bearing on your development. How do you suppose witchcraft has held back Africans?

So is it possible to make education better with technology? Maybe not with laptops, but with other tools (smart boards, perhaps?). Has any evidence shown that it makes learning better?

Granted eReaders were a niche at the time of OLPC, we didn't fully grok where laptops fell on the useful vs distracting scale and the idea of a general purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really cool and probably the best way to on-board them onto the internet.

All in all, OLPC's heart was in the right place, but until we know how to properly introduce computers into the classroom as a general purpose educational device, something more like a rugged eReader and open source textbooks feels like it would be more productive in accomplishing at least some of the goals of OLPC.

That's the least innovative way of thinking. Ever.

PS: I'm not saying $100 laptops in Africa or good or bad, just saying your argument is ridiculous.

If textbooks were cheaper, Khan Academy would not be successful.

Open Educational Resources (OER) hopefully will make some inroads on this but until then, textbooks are generally more expensive.

In this context, a laptop is as useless as a paper weight. They need basic stuff like books, pens, decent lunches, desks to write on etc.

I'm sorry but having your "heart in the right place" doesn't cut it. They wasted money on useless crap that could have been spent on far more useful stuff.

But if we could get to the stage where the licensing costs are are small compared to the production costs, the laptop would do better, because it could contain thousands of books.

Not to mention the storage and care of 100 books in less-than-ideal housing where moisture and rodents are very real problems. Plus the actual volume of 100 some books.

Compared to a laptop, that can sit in your bag, and also serve as a light source.

It doesn't need to be a good laptop, it just has to be a laptop. There were still french farmers using text only BBS like terminals a decade ago, quite happily.

In third world countries like mine (India), the government produces text book content, prints and sells the books at subsidized prices. Stationery items are totally untaxed. If you look at the link I provided, you will realize that the most expensive textbooks in India cost about $2. $100 will buy 5 years worth of books for a student. That's much more useful than a substandard PDA with wifi.

But I believe that _that_ is « The real reason why OLPC failed », not that it would have been a bad idea if it were possible.

An ereader already contains all of the hardware to be an interactive computer (especially if it has a keyboard, like the kindle 1, 2 and 3). It really shouldn't cost any more to deploy an Alan Kay-style dynabook than to deploy ereader appliances.

> the idea of a general purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really cool

The idea wasn't that you could teach programming with the aid of the computers. The idea was that you could teach everything with the aid of computers.

Perhaps I was wrong to target superstition, but there is something there that made it much more difficult to operate than the program for Canadian indigenous people. I really hoped that OLPC would bring some truth to these communities, I personally felt that's what we fought against the most - the lack of truth.

Call it uninformed, but you look at your situation differently than an outsider does. Just because you were able to get through the bullshit doesn't mean that millions of your neighbors will as well.

Also, you don't buy 100 books at once. A year in school will need about 10 books. Send the next 10 next year.

Additionally, having a dictionary, spell checker and encyclopedia at your fingertips make a laptop a great addition to a classroom.

But your argument is exactly that: You're implying that books and pencils are more important for education than "high"-tech.

Do you really think having a pencil, textbook and a notepad is more important than having access to the internet with countless, excellent free resources of education (e.g. Khan Academy).

* it works even after getting a bit wet

* it works even if I sit on it (caveat: the hinge will definitely snap if I sit on the screen while it is open)

* I highlight, underline, and annotate documents with it

* I can do useful work in it. (As an example, I made [0] on one of my OLPC XO-1 laptops. I also developed a patch for ico [1] on the same laptop.)

* I can easily copy and share my work or other people's work with it.

(If you want, I can post some videos to defend this. The OLPC is a really well-designed piece of hardware, and too few people have gotten to experience it.)

[0] http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/ico

Solar-charged laptops can be weather-sealed and are much less useful for unintended destructive uses.

My central point is that superstition is not the cause of our relative backwardness in world standards of wealth/health and equality, neither is it a contributing factor. It's merely a symptom.

Superstition is a symptom of poor means, not a cause of them. Therefore the central point of your statement being that "If we can remove one or two of these superstitions, then uplifting African society will be so much easier" is ridiculous.

Take any African child, give him food, shelter and an education (Hello Maslow). See how fast he will drop his belief that his uncle or grandfather bewitched him. I wish I had a better argument to make than saying that I am a product of that transition and I see it playing out everyday in every corner of my country and the neighboring countries with the same start and end.

To expand a little on that, we do not need "truth". An African child in my experience needs food first, then shelter, then books and pencils which in my corner of the world cost $10 for one child for a year. When that child has the basics of education pat down, he will now seek knowledge(truth?), he will now have use and time for the latest rasberry pi powered widget and so on.

One of the best things I have seen to work wonders around these parts are the school feeding programs we have in very few locations. You see these programs take care of the food aspect and the poorest of parents are inspired to take their children to school, chiefly because the child can now have food (priority 1) while also learning (priority x based on the parent's education level/social beliefs and so on).

OLPC atleast from my take on it is the equivalent of throwing a suitcase of money to a drowning man. Yes, once he is out of the water he will love it, but it is of little utility when his priority is just the next breath or the next day in the lives of African kids.

Strangely enough the first kindle e-reader was released the same month as the XO laptop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle

Scale that to the students themselves - if they don't have early digital exposure, they very likely will be excluded from being digital natives.

Add to the mix, needing the same curriculum in many languages. Some of these problems can be assisted digitally.

Textbooks for higher education cost a few more than $2 each.

I agree that reading textbooks on a laptop is not ideal. But giving someone 600 books in 1 device has merit, especially when those devices are shared.

I do like the comments in this article pertaining to e-readers. I am a very late convert to Kindles, and they are usable.

In India particularly, devices like the $35 Aakash tablet are also making inroads.

It all, like you said comes down to accessibility of quality content. Digital delivery will continue to have an increased role in that.

Any peer-reviewed studies on a grade school computer-based curricula out there?

There are certainly enough people in the US who believe just that.

But if you could get thousands of books on a laptop you wouldn't need to know _which_ 200 books a given child would benefit from most.

I think both situations have unique benefits and drawbacks, and ranking which of those are worth more than others is something we don't yet have an objective measure for. As such, the comparison still seems quite subjective, even if we can give concrete numbers to a lot of the comparisons. The answer to which is best might even be situational.

Yes, but being able to read them at any moment in any place certainly does require power. Hard to read a paper book a night or in a room without windows.

For reference, I buy my niece some nice books for $1 each. These last the who year and are available everywhere.

I'm more optimistic about this than you seem to be. The OLPC XO-1 has a lithium-iron phosphate battery [0], which are only now reaching the end of their design lives. Anecdotally, I have two XO-1 laptops, and one still has hours of battery life, and the other has only a little over one hour.

There is no rotating media. There are no fans. The keyboard is a single piece of silicone rubber. I've dropped one of mine from waist-high onto a vinyl floor, and only a piece of trim plastic popped off. (I put if back on later with a screwdriver.)

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they could last 10 years in the field, especially seeing as how mine are ten years old and are nearly pristine.

[0] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification#Battery

Here's a directory dump from one of mine: https://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library-listing.txt

Cheap 10" tablets are definitely easier to make than cheap 10" E-readers, though.

Do I hear a $300? Or is that all we got?

When the US military was trying to put Iraq and Afghanistan back together, someone there approached OLPC about supplying the XO-1 to the kids. A huge concern was that it could be turned into a really effective IED trigger. There is a camera to detect motion, a DC-capable audio jack for wiring in arbitrary parts, the speakers and microphone for range-finding, the resistive touchpad as a pressure sensor, and of course the WiFi for sending commands. To initiate the explosion there was an audio output jack, USB ports that could be powered on or off, and a screen backlight.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/10/12/amazon-con...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/09/06/160697501/new-amazon-kindle-w...

An eReader can serve the role of a general purpose computing device, but it would not serve that role as well as a laptop.

So if you optimize a rugged poly-carbonate brick you could take through a Monsoon, Typhoon, Sandstorm and/or War Zone for the sole purpose of loading text and simple document files and a low-power display, stuffed with only a battery, enough compute power to accomplish the task it is given and cover any overhead, and enough storage to hold however many books you decide you want it to hold, without any graphics or sound (or perhaps very simple graphics), then you still have something meaningful.

You have a Library of Alexandria that any kid can carry in their arms without any of the ideological attachments that the XO had. It holds information in a human readable format and is capable of displaying that information to the person who holds it so long as they are literate.

Much like a modern day light bulb can be a general-purpose computing device that for some reason has been limited to turning on and off in different colors. It might not seem terribly useful to you, but it thanklessly serves the role it has been tasked with without a source code button, a mesh network, a fancy GUI, or a Squeak environment.

It is a meaningful distinction to make because it will ultimately shape your budget and your ability to actually distribute devices in meaningful quantities to the device's intended users.

I'm all for designing things right, but I think it's not important to get caught up in the naming.

Display. Storage. Battery. Some way to charge it when you're nowhere near reliable electricity. Maybe a keyboard. Maybe the ability to communicate with other ones in a mesh. Maybe they can hook up to the internet if it's available.

And then lots and lots of great content pre-loaded.

For instance, ka-lite, the downloadable Khan Academy:

"The 4781 videos that are available currently have a size of 57.1 Gigabyte."

That's really not that big, any more.

I think everyone on Hacker News can agree that Technology Is The Worst (tm)

Interactive learning is critical, and I'm some cases superior to passive learning. An interactive device can become passive, but not so much the contrary.

> but until we know how to properly introduce computers into the classroom as a general purpose educational device

1. We can only know how they can be used in the third world by giving them to the third world. Any lessons learned with first world children are not obviously transferrable. This is a big problem with a lot of research in psych.

2. You're assuming the third world kids getting these, or who would most benefit, are already learning in a classroom. I see no reason to accept that assumption. Seems to me, the ones who benefit even more are those who have little to no access to consistent education, so your objection does not apply.

Cultural differences, and language barriers would likely have been a much bigger problem for a project in Africa compared to Canada. I can only look back at my time doing such project and think how stupid an naive I was, too much my way, but we did have some very experienced folks living in the larger cummunity who grounded the work.

Doing intercultural things is wonderful work, but sometimes you do not have the tools to handle it I know I didn't.

I'd find that useful. I'm sure people/kids in developing countries would too.

Sure it sounds like labor, but does a child in a deprived country need to learn how to make text bold, write a formula or even code.

You need comprehensively designed curricula that can exploit all the tech available in a completely integrated way. Instead it seems you get a pile of tablets, then a subscription to an online system, and it relies on the particular teachers comfort level with the tech and willingness to include it.

In UK schools the use of tech seems mostly unsophisticated.

I'm talking about all of it. Learning traditional mathematic analysis techniques creates a far deeper understanding than just plonking a formula into a program to look at a graph.

"Smart boards" don't do anything, except perhaps allow distribution of what's drawn on the whiteboard. I worked for a "smart board" company. They're neat for managerial presentations and a complete boondoggle for education.

Technology is pushed into education because it makes deans, principals, and superintendents look good on their resume. But the actual outcomes are worse for everyone else.

To my mind OLPC is a success if .01% of the kids who get one learn something important. That OLPC can make thousands of books available is useful: it lets the kid who digs in learn something that their village needs has never done before.

None of my English teachers have brought a hammer into the classroom. The Physics/science teachers need one of those 2 meter cartoon rubber hammers for some demonstrations. The shop class needs 40 different types of hammers, and 6 of them there is enough for each student to have one. The art class needs a couple hammers, and once in a while the teacher will borrow a complete set from the shop classroom. You can continue the logic for other areas.

Now that have set our mind right, what about computers. There are a number of places where computers are useful in school, but only rarely is it because they are a computer. In English class you need a word processor - there is no particular reason a dedicated word processor only machine wouldn't work just as well if a modern one existed. Likewise in all other classes, the important part isn't the computer, the important part is the software the computer is running.

If the goal is to live like a 300BC tribesman then they don't need books, they will follow adults and learn what works. Even today for the poor that is 80% of their life: learn from and do what the adults before them did.

Where reading helps is when the kids get interested in something they couldn't know. Should they start no-til farming in their fields - done right it builds the soil, but done wrong and there is a complete crop failure. They need to build a new hut - is there modern construction methods that they could apply to build a better hut? Those are just a few of the questions that they can learn from a book, but there is no reason for everybody in the village to learn that, just one specialist.

Or https://www.usps.com/ship/mail-shipping-services.htm