A Child's View of the OLPC

Finallyjoined!!! sends us a BBC account of a dad who traveled to Nigeria and brought back an XO laptop for his 9-year-old, Rufus. Here is Rufus's review, a child's view of OLPC. "Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored. Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination... With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time."

Comments

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[4solarisinfo]

I returned from Nigeria with a sample of the XO laptop

I did RTFA, and no mention of HOW he got the laptop... I know everyone was talking about these things ending up all over the world in the black market, don't tell me it's ALREADY there.

children are overrated

[misanthrope101]

or at least their curiosity is. I have a Macbook and a Ubuntu desktop, and my kids (14, 16) have zero curiosity about either. There is nothing about kids that makes them magically curious about computer gear, programming, or whatever. Yes, they'll play DDR or Prince of Persia on the PS2, and they can write homework assignments with Abiword or OpenOffice, but "file>save as MS Word doc" is about as complex as their usage gets. I'm always bemused by the optimism that kids are going to be hacking perl scripts if they're given the opportunity. Kids are individuals, and those who are curious about computers are just curious about computers. The rest are not.

I even tried to entice my son by talking a bit about encryption, thinking he would make the connection of "aha! I can hide stuff from the old man!" but even that lure failed to get him to open the Missing Manual book. I keep hoping to find an encrypted container indicating that he's learned something, but alas he lacks my secretiveness. Kids today!

Re:Kids and computer

[d3ac0n]

Your 3-year old is advanced.

Not really.

My son learned how to do most of that (not counting playing CS. Although he does play some Web-based games at Noggin.com) at about 3 - 3/12. Now before you go saying "Well your son is just a genius." Please be aware, my son has Autism. He's not "normal" in any sense of the word, other than being physically healthy.

His learning is definitely behind that of his peers, requiring him to need a special in-school tutor to help him along. He's 5 now, and struggling along in 1st grade. Still, we're impressed with his progress so far, and are now looking for ways we can use his affinity for computers to help educate him.

The truth is, if parents would take just 5-15 minutes to sit down with their child at a computer and begin to use it with them, they would find that most kids would very quickly latch onto it, and soon be doing things with it themselves. I suspect that this will begin to happen more and more and the generation that was born into a world with computers and the internet as a common thing have kids of their own. Heck, it's ALREADY happening, if my son is any indication.

Don't sell your kids short. Get them in front of a computer and learning today. Their peers have already started.