| In many ways, the OLPC project was like "Stone Soup": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup >Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup. The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones. Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877 >Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep). We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that. Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold.
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans... Contract between EA and OLPC for open sourcing and distributing SimCity: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf |
+1 with the thinking that content was a big problem as well
Things like wikipedia & khanh academy offline in-a-box and translated into local languages like they have now would have been a better direction of effort for OLPC in general.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download [2] https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ (replaced KA Lite)