Tuesday, May 01, 2007

OLPC info




I'm a huge fan of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and I think it has the potential to change the world in a fundamental way, connecting children all over the world together in a distributed community that we've never seen before. The free software/open source ideas are critical to the success, because it's going to allow children to have access to the internals of the computer in a way that we haven't seen since I was young in the 1980's, with BASIC and LOGO on personal computers.

Sugar is a really interesting metaphor, and it has some exciting concepts like TamTam. The OLPC project has some Interface Guidelines that are quite detailed and interesting. I love the keyboard as well a good layout I think. Hopefully it will be nice to type on.

But what we really need to make sure happens is that we have systems to allow children to program new applications themselves, systems like hacketyhack are going to be really important to teach programming to kids. We need more of this, ways for kids to easily create useful applications that they and their friends can hack on and extend to do what they want to do.

It's not a revolution, it's evolution. Go kids go! Leave us in the dust!