Parimala Inamdar - OLPC Khairat Visit

I had an informational visit with an assorted group to a school in Khairat village about 100 kms outside Pune. The One Laptop Per Child Project that sprung out of MIT’s Media Lab has tied up with Reliance Communications and this is their first XO laptop pilot project in India. Reliance took us around hospitably. I was reminded of Ravi/Vikram/Gaurav/ Dinesh/Nitin in early days of our Sindhudurg project. The XOs are given to all of 22 children and 1 teacher in this small village school. The estimated population of the village is about 200 people. This is a 1 teacher, 1 classroom, multi-grade school with 22 children from grade 1-4. The high school is about 3 kms away, outside Khairat. This pilot project started in September 2007. We saw children writing their names, drawing pictures, using the calculator and generally playing around with how the touchpad & menus of the XO work, completely engrossed. Reportedly, they were initially taught a bit by Carla Gomez Monroy (OLPC) when she first came here in the early days of the pilot. The teacher and kids are now exploring the rest of the Sugar interface. They would look over at each others screens and help each other. They also did some interesting collaborative activities which are enabled by Sugar. Once the laptops come “on”, they form a mesh network with each other. This enables kids to see all other “on” laptops in the network on their interface screen. They can then choose to chat with any or all of the “on” laptops. The teacher uses this in an interesting way. He asks everyone to open chats with everyone else and then gives them arithmetic sums to do and all kids write in their answers. It works somewhat like an audience poll on a game show, and then he corrects them as the answers come in. They had a lot of fun with that. One of the programs that lets them create animated toys. Many were trying this but still fumbling on how to animate an object that they may have drawn. The teacher also showed us how they share files and can collaborate synchronously to create text documents through the mesh. The children take their laptops home and bring them to school each day. Why? Because they use them at home and also continue chatting! Parents reportedly think its great because it keeps kids within their sight and not wandering off in the countryside :-0 !! I was told that the range of this mesh network can be much as 2 kms. According to the teacher and kids there has not been a single hardware or software breakdown since they got these laptops in September 2007, which is amazing! However, for some reason internet was not working, so they had no connectivity on each laptop. The XO has many other features you can look up on the OLPC Wiki. I can see that the project in India will go through its cycle of challenges – pedagogical, technical and administrative. An enriching day watching curious children making discoveries!