Today, I had my first encounter with an OLPC laptop. It was in the home of a member of Sudden Flowers Productions. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to enhance educational oppertunities for poor children by providing them with their own robust, open source laptops. After hearing so much about the initiative, I was ecstatic that one of the youth I’m teaching is using of an OLPC laptop to do some independent studying.
Oh Friday, we had our last Photoshop lesson, reviewing what I taught them about layers and color correction. I thought they could use more time to play around with what they learned, but they insisted that we move on to discuss web design. It was pretty gratifying to arrive at the office this morning and find several of the youth on the old Windows laptop messing with the highlights and saturation of photos they took last week. Seems they do have that all figured out and are ready to move on. The next three hours consisted of playing with and discussing a few web based interactive projects (1, 2, 3, 4) followed by writing some simple HTML and CSS documents.
Tensaye (on the left in the first photo below) was especially eager to learn about web design. “This is my dream,” he confided in me last week. “Okay,” I told him, “We’ll make it happen.” After today’s lesson, we headed to his house to load the example files onto his family’s desktop computer. That way, he could experiment on his own until the next lesson on Friday. But the computer didn’t have the right drivers for my USB drive. After unsuccessfully trouble shooting for a few minutes, Tensaye suddenly perked up and asked one of his relatives to get the “little computer.”
I gasped with delight when I saw the green OLPC OX-1 laptop. Seems that it sat largely unused in the house since Tensaye’s older relative had received it in school a few months ago.
Tensaye plugged my USB drive into the laptop, and it loaded no problem. He copied over the examples and resource files.
What totally endeared me to the device was the keyboard. Characters of the Amharic fidel were printed alongside the Roman letters! I asked Tensaye if any other keyboards were set up this way. “Nope,” he said. ”First in Ethiopia.”
I showed him how to swivel the screen around for easier reading. “I will use this a lot,” he said scrolling through the documents. “You have to test me. On Friday, ask me what I learned over the week on my own, and I will show you.”
Thanks, OLPC. Mission accomplished.