One Laptop per Child
Non-profit initiative / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative that operated from 2005 to 2014 with the goal of transforming education for children around the world by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
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Formation | January 28, 2005; 19 years ago (2005-01-28) |
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Type | Non-profit |
Headquarters | Miami, Florida, U.S. |
Official language | Multilingual |
Founder | Nicholas Negroponte[1][2] |
Key people | |
Website | laptop |
When the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so achieving this objective required bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer designed by Yves Béhar[3] with Continuum, now EPAM Continuum.[4] The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, and Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support. After disappointing sales, the foundation shut down in 2014.[1]
The OLPC project was the subject of much discussion. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English.
It was criticized from many sides regarding its US-centric focus ignoring bigger problems, high total costs, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success. The OLPC project is critically reviewed in a 2019 MIT Press book titled The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.[5]