Hole in the Wall

OLPCI came across this article from business week (2000!) it asks the question: "What would happen if you put a computer in a public place with a high speed internet connection?" The answers are surprising. Kids (mostly 6-12) in slums who can't read English were able to draw pictures, play music and browse the net. The computer had no keyboard and was protected behind a wall, and yet it was a success. Kids used it and when they suggested taking it away the parents said "no!". A failure, in my estimation, would have been if the computer was left running and nobody used it.
I think this bodes well for the OLPC project. The big difference is that the $100 laptop would be one kid's computer, a computer they can keep and take home. They can explore the world and their mind at their own leisure. They can download tens of thousands of books (from the Gutenberg Project, for instance) and you don't have to worry about the libraries budgetary constraints, or if someone else has already borrowed the book.
Links:
  • You can watch a video of this project from Frontline (2002).
  • More up-to-date information of the project is available at hole-in-the-wall.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shortest Sudoku solver in Python

Mark Byer's site has some more Sudoku solvers here's a short one in Python that's only 178 bytes long: def r(a):i=a.find('0');~i or exit(a);[m in[(i-j)%9*(i/9^j/9)*(i/27^j/27|i%9/3^j%9/3)or a[j]for j in range(81)]or r(a[:i]+m+a[i+1:])for m in'%d'%5**18] from sys import*;r(argv[1]) On the site is also shown a longer Perl version at 185 bytes: use integer;sub R{for$i(grep!$A[$_],@x=0..80){%t=map{$_/27-$i/27|$_%9/3-$i%9/3&&$_ /9-$i/9&&($_-$i)%9?0:$A[$_]=>1}@x;R($A[$i]=$_)for grep!$t{$_},1..9;return$A[$i]=0} die@A}@A=split//, ;R I think the Python version is slightly easier to understand, although they are both quite cryptic. I'm not sure why I find these programs fascinating. I think it reminds me that any program can be written in such a way that it's cryptic, even in Python. In addition, the code is small enough that you should be able to figure out how it works, and may learn something the process. Related is: how t...
Read more

Seven Segment Display in Inkscape

Image
Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't hand...
Read more