Khaled Hassounah, director of Nicholas Negropontes’ One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Africa and the Middle East, has spent the last year touring schools in Nigeria. He and his team chose a school 10 miles outside Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to deploy the company’s first child-friendly laptops in the region.

These 10 and 11-year-old students are lucky to share three books per academic subject, a clock, bell, wall calendar, and science equipment consisting of a lever. Students in less fortunate schools might share three books total. With the XO Children’s Machine, OLPC hopes young students will have the tools to shape their own education. [full article here ]

Microsoft is nowhere in this project. Why? You guessed it. Cost. So what’s driving these laptops? Open source software [definition] that’s what! A brand new interface called Sugar designed without any words for children in any country. Fantastic.

So here are very poor children, thousands of miles away from us, in a community with minimal resources, possibly different values and guess what? The guiding principles for the interface on the Children’s Machine was designed to reinforce concepts of teamwork and interconnectedness. Not so different afterall then.

One of OLPC’s major goals is helping children feel comfortable customizing their laptop configurations and guiding their own learning. Some laptops barely made it out of the plastic packaging before the students began experimenting.

For me, this is probably one of the most impactful stories of the year in education terms - or do I have rose tinted glasses on?

JB