On Friday I had a chance to attend a seminar which organized by the OLPC Foundation of Sri Lanka. The main focus of that event was to introduce a laptop that was designed and developed for children at rural areas between 6 to 12 years in the developing countries. The computer was mainly designed for providing a way of reducing the impact of digital divide among developed and under developed countries by giving the under privileged children a medium to access to education. The laptop itself is geared with all the necessary components that need for the child’s education in most of the aspects such as activities done in the classroom, in the field, at home, among friends, etc.
There we had two speakers from MIT Media Lab and from UN, where they explained the importance and the impact that can cause to the future of the education in the countries like ours. The speaker from MIT gave us an explanation and a demonstration about how the laptop works and what kind of work the child can do with it. It has some cool features such as mesh networking, video conferencing, chatting kind of social networking facilities, easy and handy ways of powering up the laptop (since it needs only 2 Watts to run the entire system, which means the power consumption is very minimal compared to normal ones), every software and the OS is Free and Open Source, water proof casing etc and you can get more information by visiting laptop.org.
They told that currently there is a pilot run has been started at Sri Lanka with the Sri Lankan Officials and they have successfully used the system at Thailand, Haiti, India, Cambodia, etc and several governments have considered giving this laptop to their younger generation.
tHOUGHTS & iDEAS 