Government FAQ

These are questions commonly asked by governmental officials about the OLPC plan, with short answers here and links to longer discussions elsewhere. Please add questions and answers that you have encountered.

OLPC and Partners

What is One Laptop Per Child?

Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

What is Sugar Labs?

Sugar Labs is the non-profit/NGO responsible for Sugar education software development.

Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by almost one-million children in more than forty countries. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers. Sugar is and open-source software.

How are OLPC and Sugar Labs related?

Sugar Labs is a spin-off of OLPC. They coordinate their work on XO hardware and Sugar software.

What are the OLPC groups?

TBD

Are they official parts of OLPC?

OLPC America is. The other groups are formed by volunteers.

XO

What is the XO?

XO: The Children's Machine

Does the XO run Microsoft Windows?

Yes, but you don't want it for your schoolchildren. Windows imposes extra costs at every turn for upgrades and applications, and does not run the Sugar education software.

You may hear the argument that schoolchildren should use the tools that are the de facto standard in business and government offices. There are several objections to this theory, particularly as it applies to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

• Linux, Sugar, and other Free Software comes with source code, so that more advanced students can learn from it and improve it. In particular, it can be adapted to any local language requirements without asking permission from a vendor.

• It will be 6-12 years before children now in elementary school (grades 1-6) graduate from a secondary school, and either enter the workforce or go on to higher education. If you look at the software of 6-12 years ago, and compare it with what is in use today, you will see that this idea would not have worked well in the past, and is unlikely to work better in the future.

• The only constant in the world today is change. Children need to learn to adapt, not learn to use only one kind of software.

• We do not know what will be the de facto standard in business and government 6-12 years from now. Many countries are considering converting all of their operations to Free Software.

• That isn't how we teach children anything else.

What does the XO cost?

Currently, the cost is $189 in quantity, starting at 10,000 units.

What else will we need to pay for?

OLPC provides

• XOs
• School servers
• Sugar software
• Creative-Commons licensed learning content
• Some localization

OLPC does not provide

• Electricity
• Internet
• Teacher training

Open Learning Exchange, Earth Treasury, and other organizations can assist with these requirements.

What questions should I ask when evaluating XOs and other computers for education?

The first question is, What do our students need? The answer to that question determines what weight to give the rest of the questions.

Children, especially poor children in areas lacking infrastructure, need computers that are

• rugged
• safe
• secure
• inexpensive
• environmentally friendly
• able to run on limited power
• able to communicate in the absence of the Internet
• fast enough
• capacious enough
• able to run the best education software
• usable in sunlight

These are not the questions asked by prosperous buyers, who usually want the biggest and fastest computers they can afford. There are, of course, many computers with faster processors, more memory, and more storage than the XO, but no others designed specifically to meet the stringent requirements of children.

Effects

What evidence do we have for the effectiveness of XOs and Sugar?

See

• Academic Papers
• Experience and Anecdotal Evidence
• [[Education Team/Education Bibliographies|Education Bibliographies]

If you would like to see more specific measures, please ask us.

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