One Laptop Per Child in Columbia
Nicholas Negroponte dreams of delivering one laptop to each child in the world, and he is executing on that dream. Negroponte emphasizes that this is an education project, not a laptop project. This update describes the impact of OLPC in Columbia.
Children Teaching Parents
There are one billion children in the world today. Fifty percent of them don’t have electricity at home or at school. For many of them, the light of the laptop’s LCD is the brightest thing in the home at night. Children learning through the OLPC program are passing on their lessons to their parents. Six-year-old children are teaching their parents to read.
Why Laptops?
Aren’t laptops a luxury? Why not give books?
As a matter of fact, each laptop can store the equivalent of 100 books. Each OLPC laptop comes standard with wireless networking built-in. So in a village of 100 laptops, the children have access to 10,000 books – more books than you’d find in a library at a typical US school.
OLPC goes far beyond laptops. It’s about education.