The ‘One Laptop Per Child’ organization is actively working on a solution to provide laptops to millions of children around the world for educational use. The project, which is available at http://laptop.org/, is working towards creating the first $100 laptop specifically tailored for children living in developing nations.
The laptop itself contains a number of unique features that suit itself for use in developing nations. The machine itself was specifically designed to be child-friendly, extremely durable and requires very little power. Various energy management options exist, including hand-cranks, solar panels and car battery adaptors.
The user interface is image-based and does not resemble the Windows or the Macintosh platforms. Instead, it uses Lynx as a base with the UI developed in Python. In fact, there is no real hard drive. Instead, the system uses 512MG of flash memory. So what tasks can this laptop accomplish? The system contains a web browser, word processor, RSS reader, e-mail client, chat client, journal, wiki, multimedia authoring and playback environment, music composition toolkit, graphics applications, games and a shell are all being implemented in the device.
One of the most interesting features of the laptop is its ability to create and extend a “mesh” wireless network. This features allows each laptop to act as a local “router” which effectively works to expand the current wireless network, thus connecting people who are geograpically isolated. A graphical representation of this idea can be seen in the Flash movie below:
Some great video overviews of the OLPC Project:
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