Programs similar to one laptop per child

When covid shuttered schools around the world throughout and, in many areas, into , the work that schools and teachers did for students suddenly fell to parents and caretakers, and it became apparent that having a working laptop and internet was only one step toward learning.

The youngest students in particular needed full-time supervision and support to have any hope of participating in remote classes. Parents, who were often also juggling their own jobs, struggled to provide this support.

The results were stark. Millions of parents especially mothers dropped out of the workforce for lack of child care. Rates of child depression and suicide attempts soared.

The stress of the pandemic, and the existing social inequities it accentuated, clearly took a toll on students—laptops or no. To understand the importance of social support, we can also look at what students do with their laptops in their free time.

On the other hand, there is evidence that when laptop programs are not well supported, disadvantaged children can fall even further behind as the computer becomes more of a distraction than a learning tool. The singular focus on access creates the sense that if children fail to learn when they ostensibly have all the tools they need for success, it is nobody's fault but their own.

Branded educational technology platforms and automated monitoring tools are common today. But it is hard to avoid messaging that places the emphasis on hardware. Most crucially, this individualistic framing implies that if change fails to materialize, it is not the fault of the schools or economic conditions or social structures or national policies or infrastructure. In , even in the face of mounting evidence that OLPC was failing in its mission, he doubled down, claiming that children would be able to teach themselves to read and code with tablet computers literally dropped from helicopters.

Here, as in the press coverage of OaklandUndivided, the focus was clearly on giving out machines, with an implication that the rest—learning, success, transformation—would follow. And that was for in-person instruction. The remote schooling that required all around the world compounded all the problems OLPC faced and made it painfully clear that closing that divide will require more than just laptops and internet connections.

What is really needed is the same robust social safety net so crucial in overcoming many other types of inequities. She is an assistant professor of practice in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. QuEra Computing, launched by physicists at Harvard and MIT, is trying a different quantum approach to tackle impossibly hard computational tasks. In Afghanistan, tech entrepreneurship was once promoted as an element of peace-building.

Now, young coders wonder whether to stay or go. Volunteer-run projects like Log4J keep the internet running. The result is unsustainable burnout, and a national security risk when they go wrong.

Stay up to date on result for: One Laptop per Child. Organizations similar to or like One Laptop per Child. See more. Sentences for One Laptop per Child. However, since the introduction of the One Laptop per Child foundation and its low-cost XO-1 laptop, the computing industry started to pursue the price too. Personal computer - Wikipedia. Charities like One Laptop per Child are dedicated to providing infrastructures through which the disadvantaged may access educational materials.

This will mobilize children. In addition it has significant spill-over effect on the entire family where a child has the OLPC.

Of the many values of scale, the foremost is the child as teacher. Peer-to-peer learning is one of the best ways to leverage children.

The reach of such collaboration can go far beyond national borders and, in the longer term, lead to the bigger goals of world peace and understanding. To this end, OLPC is launching on three continents and in at least six countries. Any parent whose child has a laptop at home has almost undoubtedly asked that child for help. This by no means destroys the parent-child relationship.

On the contrary, it enhances it. A bond to learning is formed between the child and parent at home. The teacher-child relationship can and will likewise benefit. With sufficient self-confidence, teachers can learn from children without risk of unraveling the fabric of education—quite the contrary, improving it.

Children must not only own the laptop, but take it home. In so doing the whole family will benefit. The role of the child in society changes; it is a more productive role. The child is not the object of change but the agent of change.

Children need more—not fewer—features than high-end laptops. Notably, they need three things unique to their condition: low power, sunlight readability, and automatic connectivity. Low power is key. Most children do not have electricity at home. Therefore, a laptop needs to run on both human power and long-life batteries. Human power, whether cranking or other gestures, must run a laptop at least 1-to one minute of cranking provides ten minutes of use.

In the case of batteries, a hour life is need. Laptops cannot be plugged in at desks in classrooms. Even the richest school does not provide power to each desk.

Sunlight-readable displays are important for outdoor use as well as power conservation. This should be achieved as an option to traditional backlighting, not as a replacement to it. Both are needed. Furthermore, during night-time use, the laptop itself needs to be the light source for the surrounding area.

Instead, the laptops collectively have to make a network automatically, without child or teacher intervention. Roughly children should be able to share a single point of back haul to the Internet. While this may be modest bandwidth, among themselves and with a school server they must have very broadband connections. A further goal of the OLPC effort is to awaken the software and hardware giants to the needs of children in the developing world and thus to reconsider their strategies. There is a more extensive image gallery here.