One Laptop per Child
Last night I had the opportunity to see a speech by Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association. I had read a little bit about the program in the past, but had always considered it to be a pie-in-the-sky academic exercise. I was wrong.
Watching Negroponte speak, I realized I was witnessing something really amazing. The OLPC project is exactly the kind of thing that I hope to do one day. They’ve taken a really, really, really hard and gigantic problem and made it work: I saw the laptop with my own eyes. Just considering the types of problems they had to solve is staggering. They’ve: created a new financial instrument to fund the projecct, developed an entirely new user interface paradigm, created hardware at a price nobody thought possible, worked with governments across the world to ensure widespread acceptance, and much more. They solved problems that I didn’t even think existed. Negroponte spoke about how the target schools for the program do not have access to electricity. I had read about this in previous articles about the program, and I was aware of the novel “hand crank” they had built into prototypes that would allow children to generate power. But the first generation shipping product actually uses a pull-cord, something like you see on children’s talking dolls. Apparently their research showed that this design reduces overall muscle strain.
The pull-cord is just one small example of the brilliance I learned about last night. This is world-changing stuff.