OLPC

I should be posting my week 6 task right now, but I will post this now and the week 6 task tomorrow.

OLPC stands for One Laptop Per Child. It is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, and others who have worked at the MIT Media Lab. 

The idea was to create a low cost, rugged laptop that could be distributed, en masse, to kids in developing countries. The OLPC foundation was seeking to make the internet available to every child, no matter their wealth. The project has had mixed success. So far a little over 2 million laptops have been distributed around the world.


Hardware
The specifications of the computers are not particuarly impressive.  

• 400MHz cpu
• 512 MB Ram
•  2GB internal flash hard drive
• 7.5 inch LCD screen
• Keyboard is a single piece of rubber that is moulded into the shape of a keyboard.

There are some great things about the design, though, that are worth mentioning.  These laptops are designed for kids aged 6-12 who might live anywhere.  The laptop has no movin parts in it, so moving it while it is on won't hurt it.  It's designed to be able to survive being dropped a lot.  If it is turned off and dropped into a bucket of water it will probably suffer no ill effects (although I wouldn't try it).  It has a handle so the kids can carry it easily.  These guys knew their audience and the design of the computer, though clunky and boxy, is actually quite practical.  The screen can swivel right around and fold back over the keyboard.

The idea of the laptop is for it to have very low power consumption, as kids who don't have access to electricity are going to have to charge the battery themselves.  This is done, I think, by linking a hook to your foot and pulling a string, kind of like a pull start on a lawnmower, which creates an electrical current and charges the battery.  I'm not sure about this, though, I feel like I might be wrong.  Feel free to look it up and correct me.


The monitor has two modes:

1. Normal colour.  It's not particularly impressive, but it works.
2. There is also a high contrast gray scale mode that allows the screen to be easily read in direct sunlight.  For kids who can't stay indoors a lot, this is a real advantage.

The screen is very high resolution for its size, getting something that looks around 1024 x 768, but the pixels don't work quite like a regular LCD.

Software
The operating system on the OLPC is called Sugar.  It is a unique operating system in almost every aspect, not least because it is written completely in Python, which is unheard of.  Of course it includes byte code as well, but the OS itself is Python.  Python is an extremely high level programming language and the idea, I think, is for it to be accessible to as many developers as possible.  The operating system uses the linux kernel.

Most of the programs written for the OLPC are written in Python also.  
Here is a picture of the Sugar home screen, or 'desktop', for lack of a better word.  

 The icon in the centre is the control panel.  Underneath it, the picture of a notebook, is the journal.  The journal is where all of your user data is saved.  It's like the 'My Documents' folder on a PC, I suppose.  From there students can open up applications where they were up to when they closed the computer last time.


The icons that make up the circle are the programs installed on the machine, but they are called 'activities', not programs.  These are the programs available in the standard installation.  There are a myriad of others that kids can download from a few different sites.


At the moment I'm writing a maths program that is unlikely to make it as one of the main programs, so when it is ready kids will be able to download it and add it to their circle of activities should they wish to do so.


Some of the activities are pretty average, but there are a few standouts that are really great.  The ideology behind this laptop is greatly influenced by Seymour Papert and so there is a huge emphasis on computer programming.  
'Turtle Art' is your classic logo program but it uses tiles so that kids don't have to learn the code themselves.
'Pippy' (the snake icon) is a python IDE and gives some simple examples of how to program in python.
'eToys' (the icon of a star shooting up) is a program which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest pieces of educational software ever written.  It is incredibly powerful and has loads of great features for kids to use to learn computer programming, maths and science.  The problem with it is that it was written in a computer programming language called 'Squeak', and it is extremely buggy.  It was developed by Alan Kay and his team at the MIT Media Lab, and he himself says that it is a great innovation, but that he needs a load of money to completely rewrite it.  If anyone ever does it properly then it will be an extremely powerful tool for learning.
'Scratch' (the icon of a cat's head) is another icon based computer language for kids.  This is written in java and is stable.  I use Scratch in my teaching almost every day and I think that it is the best way to introduce kids to programming.  Kids create blocks of code that fit together like a jigsaw.


That will do for now.  I imagine that there are lots of questions.  Feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer them.


I'm interested to know what others think about the project.  It's extremely ambitious and it has had lots of praise and criticism.


Oh, and here are a couple of pictures of the XO-3, rumored to come out next year, but we'll see.  I imagine it will look quite different and that it will come out late.