Khaled Hassounah, director of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Africa and the Middle East, has spent the last year touring schools in Nigeria. He and his team chose a school 10 miles outside Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to deploy the company’s first child-friendly laptops in the region.
Hassounah shows the students how to boot up their open-source laptops. The bright colors were designed to appeal to children, but the bug-like antennae are mostly practical. Two wireless receptors magnify the laptop’s ability to net an Internet connection, which varies in availability throughout the test regions.
This school is the first test deployment site for OLPC’s XO laptops. OLPC installed a satellite dish, power generator, and modem to give the school electricity and Internet connectivity.
During a rigorous training session, Hassounah instructs the students to identify and hold aloft each of the laptop’s components, starting with the power adapter. The step-by-step instruction is part of how the children will learn to respect and use what will now be their personal education tool.
After becoming more comfortable with their laptops, the children begin to explore with programs, settings and physical units. One of OLPC’s major goals is helping children feel comfortable customizing their laptop configurations and guiding their own learning. Some laptops barely made it out of the plastic packaging before the students began experimenting.
Its good to see the laptops in use. I thought it would of been much longer then now, plus I would of thought they would of given them to a richer area because the government wanted more control over the publicity. But having a school close to a major city, but poor enough to possibly struggle (The teacher not even having used a computer before), means that it really will be a test if they had made the correct decisions.
I wonder when we’ll start seeing them on ebay.
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