Changes

While Negroponte reinforced that OLPC is “an education project, not a laptop project,” in nearly the same breath he emphasized that OLPC would not provide the educational software to enable learning, but would instead look to the countries in which the laptops were deployed to do this. The relative emphasis on achieving the goals of one-to-one computing (driven by the metric of scale) versus driving children’s development (driven by learning metrics) was a dichotomy that would come to define our future (and became the cause of a rift in our organization that would eventually take us in different directions).

While Negroponte reinforced that OLPC is “an education project, not a laptop project,” in nearly the same breath he emphasized that OLPC would not provide the educational software to enable learning, but would instead look to the countries in which the laptops were deployed to do this. The relative emphasis on achieving the goals of one-to-one computing (driven by the metric of scale) versus driving children’s development (driven by learning metrics) was a dichotomy that would come to define our future (and became the cause of a rift in our organization that would eventually take us in different directions).

The story of creating learning software for the laptop–which we later named Sugar–is largely untold. The development of Sugar began in 2005 when Walter Bender—then executive director of the Media Lab and a member of the original OLPC team—began a software initiative specifically aimed at increasing the probability of children learning with their XO laptops. The development of Sugar closely parallels the development of the XO hardware: the software and the hardware were developed concurrently, initially by the same team of designers and engineers, working under the enormous pressure of limited time and resources.

The story of creating learning software for the laptop—which we later named Sugar—is largely untold. The development of Sugar began in 2005 when Walter Bender—then executive director of the Media Lab and a member of the original OLPC team—began a software initiative specifically aimed at increasing the probability of children learning with their XO laptops. The development of Sugar closely parallels the development of the XO hardware: the software and the hardware were developed concurrently, initially by the same team of designers and engineers, working under the enormous pressure of limited time and resources.

===An Electronic Play Space===

===An Electronic Play Space===