Probably their first use with Linux not least their first look at a real computer. While these young African children will be interfacing with the computer using Sugar (pictured above) and applications such as Etoys, the underlying OS is Linux. Jessica Dolcourt posted a great article on the One Laptop Per Child initiative in Nigeria on CNET news. We are finally seeing the beginning of the first deployments of the laptop.
Photos and Video of the 3-day event also available.
More about the Sugar Interface:
More info at the OLPC site and on their wiki.
(BTW: you don’t need an OLPC laptop to develop applications for the laptop. See the wiki on how to use Sugar on your own computer.)
Those photos were really intriguing, but the video and article were really disappointing.
There was basically no information about what happened when the kids actually got to use their new tools, just puff pieces on the OLPC project and Khaled Hassounah, their African representative. In that whole two page article there were maybe a half dozen sentences about how the kids reacted.
It's worse than American olympics coverage, with their endless human interest stories cut with little bits of actual athletic competition.
You might ask Jessica Dolcourt to elaborate. Her email is at the top of the article. I would like to know more too.
While not specific to Africa, among the good articles on OLPC is at the IEEE Spectrum magazine. Check it out: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/4985
Its very interesting to see that there is huge massive awareness of Open Source software across almost all the countries. Being myself a strong opensource software promoter and supporter i feel very happy about the same.
by,
Kiran
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