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

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235 points ChrisArchitect | 6 comments | 16 Apr 18 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.83s | source | bottom
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dingo_bat ◴[16 Apr 18 16:05 UTC] No.16849980[source]▶
The real reason why OLPC failed is that children in downtrodden countries don't need a laptop. They need food, a healthy environment, good old fashioned classroom education and plenty of pens and notebooks. A laptop is the worst tool you can use for studying.

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.

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mjw1007 ◴[16 Apr 18 17:25 UTC] No.16850842[source]▶
Paper books are expensive to print, warehouse, and ship.

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.

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dingo_bat ◴[16 Apr 18 17:34 UTC] No.16850931[source]▶
No. Paper books for schoolchildren are extremely cheap[0]. They work without power. They work even after getting a bit wet. They work even if you sit on them. You can highlight and underline stuff on the pages. You can share it easily. You can even take small notes on the books. You can do exercises right on the book. You can take photocopies easily. There is simply no competition.

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

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j45 ◴[16 Apr 18 17:58 UTC] No.16851166[source]▶
While printing is cheap, the licensing of the content often is not and can vary from country to country.

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.

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1. mjw1007 ◴[16 Apr 18 18:04 UTC] No.16851231[source]▶
Licence costs aren't an inherent advantage of 'digital' distribution over paper, though.

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.

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2. FrojoS ◴[16 Apr 18 18:26 UTC] No.16851455[source]▶
Correct, but do student need thousands of books. Maybe 20-30 per year?
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3. j45 ◴[16 Apr 18 18:39 UTC] No.16851569[source]▶
Currently working in the EdTech space - I have read figured like ~1.9 million new teachers are needed to teach all the students not receiving an education.

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.

4. mjw1007 ◴[16 Apr 18 18:53 UTC] No.16851680[source]▶
That sounds reasonable. So with the OLPC's (pie-in-the-sky) design lifetime of 10 years, maybe it should be compared to 200-300 books.

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.

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5. avhon1 ◴[16 Apr 18 19:35 UTC] No.16852006{3}[source]▶
> (pie-in-the-sky) design lifetime of 10 years

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

6. bluGill ◴[17 Apr 18 19:38 UTC] No.16861593[source]▶
An individual student may only need 20-30 books a year, but after about 4th grade each student needs different books. They may not even know what books they need far enough in advance to get it.

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.