Elisa Fernanda Castillo Cruz, age 6, is a first grader at the Escuela Enmanuel Mongalo in Diriamba, Nicaragua--and she loves her XO computer, better known as the One Laptop Per Child laptop. "I bring it home and I teach my mama and my papa and my little brothers," she says in Spanish. "I show them all the activities they don't know--painting, writing, reading, games." She opens her favorite game, in which addition and multiplication problems drift slowly down the small black-and-white screen.
"You have to answer before they fall," she says, laughing and hiding her face in her hands when the sad face appears to tell her she got a sum wrong."
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A Grand Vision
This kind of engagement was exactly the goal when Nicholas Negroponte, then the director of MIT's famous Media Lab, launched the One Laptop Per Child not-for-profit back in 2005. With its Yves Behar-designed, Linux-based laptop and a unique open-source programming environment targeted to simple learning, OLPC is the most high-profile example of what's been dubbed "design for the bottom of the pyramid," a movement to bring the discipline of design and creative thinking to problems of poverty and development.
But Negroponte's grand vision was never matched by an attention to detail; for years, the project failed on many fronts, including production delays, inconsistent support, a lack of teacher training, and a shortage of developers willing to create software for the XO. As a 2010 article in Columbia's Journal of International Affairs concluded, "OLPC represents the latest in a long line of technologically utopian development schemes that have unsuccessfully attempted to solve complex social problems with overly simplistic solutions."
Notes and Vocabulary
OLPC: one lap top per child |
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