Beyond OLPC

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and Chairman Emeritus of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab, started the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project in 2005. This project has so far put about one million low cost educational laptops in the hands of children, mostly in developing countries. Though the OLPC project aimed to get to a price point of $100, the actual price for bulk quantities was reported to have reached about $175.

We need more such initiatives, to push the price point further down, bringing it closer to the reach of developing countries. Here we showcase some large scale educational success stories, at lower price points, where open source is at the core.

Macedonia's Computer for Every Child initiative

Macedonia is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia in eastern Europe with a population of about 2 million. They decided that if they were to join the ranks of the developed world, they had to be a knowledge and information-based society. In 2004 and 2005 they ran pilot evaluation programs. In 2006 a new government was elected with a mandate to upgrade the education infrastructure of the country. The people in the country agreed to a special tax to help pay for this.

In 2007 chose to deploy Redwood City, CA based NComputing's virtualization software and hardware with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. NComputing's virtualization software and hardware allowed 8 additional user terminals to be connected to a PC (That number has gone up to 10 additional user terminals in the newer NComputing product). NComputing's pricing is said to be as low as $70 per seat for the extra terminals. Including the shared cost of the PC and the cost of the monitors, keboards and mice for each terminal, the total cost was said to be under $200 per seat.

The resulting cost and power savings are critical to school deployments, including in Macedonia, because budgets and electricity are often limited. Macedonia also chose NComputing's technology because maintenance and replacement costs are a fraction of what they are for traditional PC deployments. NComputing's solid-state virtual PC terminals have no moving parts and require little or no maintenance, so the principal maintenance costs follow only the shared PCs and monitors. In addition, in an upgrade cycle to newer PCs, only the PCs themselves, not the virtual PC terminals, need to be replaced.

When completed in 2008, the program had deployed approximately 160,000 NComputing virtual PC terminals and 20,000 NComputing enabled PCs (which each also support a student on the attached monitor). Macedonia installed the open source operating system Ubuntu Linux 7.04. In addition, each computer was installed with open source applications OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine. All of these were localized for the Macedonian language.

(If any of our readers know what educational applications are used by Macedonia, please share it through a comment below. Thanks!)

Brazil aims to bridge the digital gap for 52 million students

In 2008 Brazil decided to do something very similar to provide shared access to 52 million students in a cost effective manner. The chose a pure software based shared desktop solution from Canadian company Userful.

Userful software pricing is said to be less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments (not including monitors, keyboards and mice). Add to this the cost of video cards and USB/2-way-audio hubs, the cost seems to be comparable to the above.

The Brazilian team initially created a localized software package with Brazilian Portuguese based on Debian Linux. However, their current software release called Linux Educacional 3.0 bundles the following open source applications - Kubuntu 8.04 Linux (includes KDE 3.5.10), Firefox, OpenOffice, graphics and multi-media utilities and several educational applications from the KDE Education Project, Kdeedu. These are:

• Educational programming environment using turtle graphics in the Logo language (Kturtle)
• Periodic table of elements (kalzium)
• Virtual planetarium (Kstars)
• Training in Geography (kgeography)
• Learn the Alphabet (klettres)
• Study of the Spanish verb forms (KVerbos)
• Japanese language reference/learning tool (Kiten)
• Hangman word guessing game (khangman)
• Game of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase (Kanagram)
• Program to help revise Latin (klatin)
• Design of mathematical functions (kmplot)
• Exercise with fractions (kbruch)
• Exercises percentages (kpercentage)
• Interactive Geometry (KLG)
• Drawing program for children (Tux paint)
• Editor Tests and examinations (KEduca)
• Game Simon Says (Blinken)
• Flash card program used for vocabulary learning (KWordQuiz)
• Vocabulary trainer (kvoctrain)
• Typing Tutor (ktouch)
  

United Nations pilot program in underdeveloped countries

In June 2009, it was reported that a United Nations initiative has signed up Ncomputing to deliver 1,000 Linux based desktops to pilot programmes at schools in underdeveloped countries. According to that report, a pilot project has already been completed in Burkina Faso, with more projects scheduled for Rwanda, Senegal and Tanzania in 2009.

"The NComputing virtual desktops give us an important opportunity to significantly expand computing access and simplify deployment," said UN project organiser Dr. Paul Jhin. "This maximizes the use of donated and refurbished computers and simplifies deployment and power requirements, which are key issues in many parts of the developing world."

Sugar on a Stick turns your old computer into an OLPC

The OLPC project developed specialized hardware as well as software applications suitable for students from the Kindergarten up to Grade 6. These applications were subsequently spun off into a separate open source project called Sugar Labs. Now Sugar Labs has released these applications, that can be downloaded and used in a USB drive, for use in any Windows or Mac PC.

You’ll basically need to download 'Sugar on a Stick' then “burn” the ISO to the USB thumb drive. Once that process is complete, stick the thumb drive in the old computer’s USB port and boot the machine up (make sure your computer is set to boot from USB). Find detailed instructions here.

Sugar has 60 to 70 applications (called Activities) including vocabulary builders, graphical learning tools as well as advanced science subjects such as Physics. Sugar applications are unique in the following ways:

• They are software packages that automatically save your work producing instances of the Activity that can be resumed at a later time.
• Many Activities support user collaboration where multiple users may be invited to join a collective Activity session.
  

So what's beyond OLPC? OSSTMC (Open Source Shared Terminal for Many Children).

Tags: open source, ncomputing, olpc, userful, sugar