First Encounter with OLPC

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.”

09-12-13OLPC19

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.

09-12-13OLPC08

Ten­saye plugged my USB drive into the lap­top, and it loaded no prob­lem.  He copied over the exam­ples and resource files.

09-12-13OLPC16

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.