The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) plans to do exactly that. Provide each child with a personal computer.
Check out the project at: laptop.org and sugarlabs.org
Hassan
Shahab Baqai in all his self proclaimed greatness unveiled his brilliant and 'revolutionary' idea for solving the problem of the lack of computers in LUMS. Give every student his or her own personal laptop at the start of the degree program! Some people think bigger.. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) plans to do exactly that. Provide each child with a personal computer. IEEE LUMS, in collaboration with the higher commission had set up a video link with Walter Bender, some professor at MIT. A bunch of other universities were also participating (we could see their mostly empty auditoriums in our screen). The topic was 'How to become a better problem solver' or something similar so we were surprised when the speaker started selling his product. Evidently, to be any good at solving problems you have to start when you are small. He and his team had developed a comprehensive software that teaches Programming/Physics/Chemistry/Math/Language/History/Geography. And then they designed a laptop it plays on. Now they are on a quest to provide every child with one of these. Things are happening in Uruguay (where the number of laptops per person is inversely proportional to income, with hundreds of thousands of their laptops in their country) and a bunch of other countries. He said he had tried to come to Pakistan but was repeatedly frustrated by the Ministry of Education. They are looking for people to translate the software to Urdu (the hardware does have a Urdu keyboard version). Now more about the software. Sometimes we decide how much information is too much for a child to handle. SugarLabs (the people leading this project) want to let the children decide whats too much. So while the software has very basic stuff that a 2nd grader can easily handle, it also contains fairly advanced programming languages. The child, or teacher/supervisor can easily open up the source code (mostly in Python) and make modifications. Also the various software have this step-by-step sequential increase in difficulty. For example with the sound program children can make their keyboard into any musical instrument and play along with their parents who use indigenous instruments. They can go on to program their own band, record music and even create their own instrument. The last step would be the child to access C-SOUND the language used by Hollywood to program sound effects into its movies. So the children have all these mountains around them and while not every mountain suits every child, the child can easily choose which one it wants to attempt to summit. Sharing is encouraged and one can easily share things (instruments, code) with surrounding laptops for the warm feeling of making something that other people want. Laptops are robust, energy-efficient and can easily be taken apart and put back by children. Well, maybe the laptop idea is a bit far fetched. The platform comes in a stick also. You can plug the stick into any old system. The pc will boot from the stick and give the feel of a new computer.
Check out the project at: laptop.org and sugarlabs.org Hassan
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