One Laptop Per Child Will Provide XO Laptops to Uruguay High School Students
10 June, 2010One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, has been awarded a bid by Plan Ceibal to provide 90,000 XO laptops for high school students in Uruguay. This is the first time the OLPC XO laptops have been specifically designed for high school-aged students and represents a major expansion in the learning program that will have a global impact. The government of Uruguay through Plan Ceibal has completely saturated primary schools with 380,000 XOs and will now begin to expand the highly successful One Laptop per Child learning program to its high schools. There are 230,000 high school students in Uruguay.
“Until now, the 1.2 million students worldwide using XO laptops had no comparable computer to ‘grow up’ to,” said OLPC Association CEO Rodrigo Arboleda. “The XO high school edition laptop demonstrates how the XO and its software can easily adapt to the needs of its users.”
The XO high school laptop (XO HS) has the same industrial design as the original XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor, it will provide 2X the speed of the XO 1.0, 4X DRAM memory and 4X FLASH memory. The XO high school laptop is designed with a larger keyboard better suited to the larger hands and fingers of older students. It will feature the learning-focused Sugar user interface on top of a dual-boot Linux operating system, with Gnome Desktop Environment that offers office productivity tools.
“Sugar allows students to collaborate with each other in a learning environment unlike the typical office worker’s computing environment,” said Claudia Urrea, Education Director for OLPC in Latin America. “Students who grew up using the XO 1.0 in the elementary classroom will feel very comfortable moving into the XO high school edition laptop.”
The XO high school laptops will be delivered with age-appropriate learning programs adapted to the scholastic needs of secondary schools. A new color variation for the laptop’s case will be an option for the high school model.
The XO laptop, specially designed for rugged environments, is well-suited for remote classrooms and daily transportation between home and school. The XO uses three times less electricity than other laptops and is built in a sealed, dust-free system.
To date, OLPC has delivered more than 380,000 XO laptops to the Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. In addition, more than 20,000 teachers have one as well. It remains one of the most successful distribution movements of laptops to students in any single nation.
Deliveries of the XO high school edition laptops will begin in September 2010.
“The arrival of the XO high school laptop is a significant milestone in our organization’s mission to provide every child on the planet with the same initial opportunity to access knowledge as the most privileged children in the developed world,” Arboleda said.
About One Laptop per Child
One Laptop per Child (OLPC at http://www.laptop.org) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
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