Quanta Building MIT's $100 Laptops (eWeek)

Posted Dec 16, 2005 20:11 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

We already know that the light is! See my other posts to this article.
=8^)

As for the software, it should be useful, but I'm not sure anybody is sure
just /how/ useful, yet. One of the important requirements has been that
it's open source, so folks can see how it's put together software-wise,
and expand it. While it's not likely they'll be doing any major C
programming on these things, they could certainly bash script all sorts of
solutions on their own. Imagine a few years from now, after the kids
given these things get to play with them and start to grow up with them.
No electricity, yet a mesh-networked set of computers in the village.
What sort of solutions might they come up with?

Apparently, there's a number of educational toys MIT has come up with,
that can connect to USB, one of the reasons these things have USB ports.
I don't know much about that side of the story, but saw it mentioned.

Anyway, in many ways, this will be a big social experiment as well. It
seems the MIT psych side is getting into this too -- that's the link with
the educational toys. It would be /very/ interesting to study just what
effect this has on the local society, and what sort of solutions they come
up with themselves, using these tools in their daily lives, communicating
with each other, using the computers as chat networks where there are no
phones, doing other things with them, using them in ways nobody has yet
envisioned. I'm sure there will be at least one or two Doctoral theses
written on the topic, and it could prove a whole new area of research!

Duncan