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36 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

[Image of children holding green and white XO laptops]

Laptops Galore

for them to stock the machine, employ someone to tell you about it, and fix it if it goes wrong in the first year. Value for money improvements have all focused on faster processors, more memory, sharper displays and larger hard drives, not lower prices. These improvements are useful if you want to shoot aliens, but overkill if you only want to surf the Internet and learn the ‘3 Rs’. So the ‘One Laptop per Child’ project has developed a device for $100.

Negroponte is often asked how he deals with the maintenance and repair issues. His answer, “There aren’t any.” The computers are treasured possessions and rarely broken or lost. Children become empowered by the machines and can access knowledge and information far beyond the wildest dreams of their parents’ generation. Stories abound of children checking the spot prices for wheat or coffee on the Chicago Stock Exchange, and advising their parents on the price to accept for their crop. Negroponte estimates there are currently 500,000 children in South America teaching their parents to read!

It’s interesting to speculate whether children learn spontaneously or are somehow ‘programmed’ by the adult members of society. In both the ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment and the ‘One Laptop per Child’ program the children could simply be learning from adults and older children, but there is a novel way to eliminate this influence. Negroponte and Mitra have teamed up to run an experiment to see how children learn for themselves. They are planning to air-drop laptops into remote villages in the Andes. In this scenario, the children can’t possibly learn from the

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