Laptops for kids


From Tucumán we have good news: In one month the software will be ready for the OLPC project in Argentina. The program is integrally designed by young Tucumanos (headed by the talented Mauro Torres) who have already finished the Tuquito OLPC User's Manual and by the end of the year will be delivering the first computers. Argentina is the only Spanish-speaking country that is involved in the project.
And Tucumán will be one of the first provinces to receive the computers. Models of the first laptops are already in the Provincial Ministry of Education.
The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project consists of facilitating access to computers and new information technologies for all low-income children in the world.
Nicholas Negroponte started the OLPC project when he presented it at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, 2005. After that, companies such as Google and News Corp set up the "One Laptop per Child" Foundation that currently has its headquarters in Delaware, U.S.A. Right now the OLPC Project is doing the first prototype trials before going on to manufacture a million computers.
The Tuquito OLPC project includes the complete development of the software that the laptops will use, and was started with the help of the Government and Justice Secretariat of Tucuman, Educ.ar and the Generación Libre Foundation.
In November last year, President Nestor Kirchner welcomed Negroponte and created a special commission headed by the person who has most put the most energy into the project within the country: Adrián Paenza, who is accompanied by a technical committee working under the Exact Sciences School of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a teaching committee that works under the National Education Secretariat and a logistics committee, under the Educ.ar website. The laptop is a powerful learning tool that was created for the world's poorest children, who live in the most remote and isolated places. In order to design it they worked with experts from the academic world as well as the information industry, which means uniting extraordinary talent and many decades of collective experience.
The result is an exclusive and harmonious combination of form and function; a device that is flexible, resistant, has a low-cost, extremely energy-efficient and that will allow emerging nations around the world make the leap over several decades into our level of development and immediately transform the children's learning content and quality. At the same time the children transfer that knowledge of the new technologies to their parents, and a two-fold aim is reached: bring the children into a wider universe and increase their self-esteem.
The children don't have to be expert uses of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With their own laptop armed with generic open-source software they will learn terms like "Web Explorer”, “Word processor”, “Spreadsheet”, “Slide viewer”, among others.
Access to Internet and expressive tools such as text, music, video or graphs are the modern-day educational “toys” that no child should be without.
The current challenge will also take on the education of the teachers so they will be prepared to guide the children through installing the laptops in the school.

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