OLPC

There's always a comfort knowing that you have friends nearby. When I was in Kampala Uganda, my comfort came from the OLPC team: Kristen, Jeff, and Victoria. Traveling on your own is exciting. You can plan your own route, take life at your own pace. But, it's awesome to know that somewhere nearby, someone cares that you made it home or that you got over being sick. So, in honor of my OLPC buds, a little info about their project.

Kristen, Jeff, and Victoria are distributing 100 OLPC laptops to the Kampala Secondary School. They have taught the children in P5 and P6 how to use the laptops. OLPC laptops are about the size of your average netbook and loaded with educational materials, games, and Wikipedia. Keeping in mind the situation, the OLPC is designed so it has a high probability of surviving being dropped, is water resistant, and can be used outside.

While it's debatable how good it is to give a child a laptop when she doesn't have basic necessities, the laptop can, when implemented properly, be used to enhance learning and give children the opportunity to explore and learn on their own.

While I was there, I saw two classes. One use the matching game (you can create your own) to practice addition. 5+7 gets matched with 12, etc. There was an odd number of kids, so I partnered with one of them and it was pretty fun. While it was definitely good practice, I'm not sure how much the kids honestly learned, but they did get to practice their addition and work on memory skills. The second class made excellent use of the laptop's capabilities. The students were learning about interest, so first they looked it up on Wikipedia, then they used the calculator application to do some sample problems. I think that shows how the OLPCs, like any tool, can be a great addition to learning if used properly, which is why the OLPC team's work training the teachers and students to use the laptops is so important.



Me and Zulfa (Fatuma's daughter) playing with the XO