One Laptop Per Child

The OLPC Laptop

The last (and most high profile) of the three contenders is the most direct approach to the problem. The project, called One Laptop Per Child (Laptop.org), is spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. As well as involving some of the MITs best minds, this project has also garnered considerable supporting within the industry, with Google, Red Hat, AMD, Brightstar Corporation, Nortel Networks, News Corporation and Canonical each contributing $2m to development costs. With such prominent web and technology backers on board, the One Laptop Per Child project could hardly ask for any more ringing endorsements, although having Kofi Annan with Nicholas Negroponte to unveil the prototype at the World Summit On The Information Society in 2005 can’t have hurt any.

The OLPC project is an attempt to design and build a rugged, independent laptop which can be distributed for use by children in the developing world. Distribution is the critical difference between the OLPC and the other proposed systems, with the intention that millions of the laptops can be distributed to countries on a literally one laptop per child ratio in almost the same manner as textbooks. With China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand already discussing the uptake of the plan the potential is there for the OLPC project to be one of the largest ever undertaken in the field of IT.

So what is at the heart of the OLPC project? Naturally the PC itself. The first and most striking element of the design for a person used to laptops in the Western world is the look of the thing. Bright colours, rounded edges, big buttons, it looks like something you’d expect to see Bob The Builder doing his taxes on. This is because whilst the OLPC project might be industrially staggering in scale and far reaching in its scope, ultimately the aim is to provide laptop computers for children. This is something almost completely unprecedented in the developed world, perhaps because we’re more aware of what the Internet is so often used for.

The construction of the OLPC computer differs in many more ways from its conventional counterparts than just its looks. The screen can be folded around so that screen faces outward when folded up. This turns the device, at 193mm x 229mm x 64mm in size, into a flat, book-sized tablet, with the screen and controls for text scrolling on the outermost panel. This makes the OLPC quite unlike other laptops for reading test and more akin to something like a PDA or tablet PC in that regard.

When closed up in the usual manner, the OLPC is at least partially sealed by a rubber lip around the edge of the display which helps to render it partially waterproof and this, coupled with a sealed rubber keyboard, means that the computer can withstand much more spillage and precipitation than an ordinary laptop, which can usually be put out of action with a poorly aimed cup of coffee. To further toughen up the computer the casing is made out of 2mm thick plastic rather than the 1.3mm used for most laptops and the ports are moulded into the plastic, providing yet more toughness.