Yesterday we got our laptop and I had a chance to play with it a bit last night. Pretty dang cool! It’s not the fastest thing in the world (I think it’s not quite as slow as my TiVo but it’s close) and it certainly has a keyboard made for child-sized hands - but it’s a really cool machine.
I managed to get it connected to my neighbor’s open wireless network so I could update the OLPC operating system which then allowed me to connect it to my wireless network. I poked around a little with the applications (they call them “Activities“) and even downloaded and installed some new ones.
The thing comes with a handful of educational games and some other things. It has a cool little program that lets you play around writing programs in Python. It all runs on a Linux base - which again makes me wish I’d find the time to ramp up my Linux skills (and my programming skills for that matter).
Most of the time I spent admiring, or at least thinking about, the design decisions that were made when putting the machine together. It seems pretty rugged - maybe my 3 year old would have trouble destroying it? It doesn’t seem “cheap” - so that’s nice. I’m not sure what I’m going to actually do with it. Maybe Jackson will bring his into the office and we can form a mesh network… but then what?
I’m trying to decide if my kid (the previously mentioned 3 year old) could actually get any use from it right now. She’s pretty handy with a mouse on a real computer but last night she seemed kind of stumped by the trackpad - especially since it comes in three sections and only the middle section works with your finger. But she’s a kid and would probably figure that out pretty fast. Maybe we should get another one for her cousin?
I know the goal of the program is to get these laptops into the hands of kids in poor countries. I know there’s also debate as to whether or not that’s a smart priority for those kids. I’m not sure where I stand on that issue - but after using this laptop for an evening I’m wondering if it might impact regular kids here in the US. I don’t know if my 3 year old could master this thing now but certainly by the time she’s 5 she would be able to get a lot of use out of it. The OLPC idea of “school servers” and these mesh networks I think would be great for any kid - poor or otherwise. I’d much rather get my kid a rugged laptop designed to help kids learn than the latest Windows machine from Dell or a MacBook Air. If all the kids in her school had one too then it would be even more compelling.
However, I think the thing that struck me the most about this machine is that my dad would have loved it!