One Laptop Per Child Project
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| Formation | January 2005 |
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| Type | Non-profit |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida, U.S. |
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Official language
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Multilingual |
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Founder
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Nicholas Negroponte |
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Key people
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Seymour Papert, Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan Kay, Mitch Bradley, Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby |
| Website | one |
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
Its primary goal continues to be to transform education, by enabling children in low-income countries to have access to content, media and computer-programming environments. At the time that the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so it was infeasible to achieve this objective without also bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support.
The OLPC project has been the subject of extensive praise and criticism. It was praised for enabling low-cost, low-power machines; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English. It has received criticism both specific to its mission, and criticism that is typical of many such systems, such as support, ease-of-use, security, content-filtering and privacy issues. Officials in some countries have criticized the project for its appropriateness in terms of price, cultural emphasis and priority as compared to other basic needs of people in third-world settings.
The OLPC program has its roots in the pedagogy of Seymour Papert, an approach known as constructionism, which espoused providing computers for children at early ages to enable full digital literacy. Papert, along with Nicholas Negroponte, were at the MIT Media Lab from its inception. Papert compared the old practice of putting computers in a computer lab to books chained to the walls in old libraries. Negroponte likened shared computers to shared pencils. However, this pattern seemed to be inevitable, given the then-high prices of computers (over $1,500 apiece for a typical laptop or small desktop by 2004).
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