One (Ten Dollar) Laptop Per Child? Repurposed NES System Holds the Key

I’m a big fan of the late great Indiana University business professor Richard Farmer. His signature book, Farmer’s Law: Junk In a World of Affluence, should be required reading in business and education schools. Check out one of my articles for Converge Magazine a few years back for more details.

Farmer noted a society’s influence could be gauged by what was thrown away. The more affluent a society, the more valuable its junk. He was an advocate of repurposing equipment and technologies, sending “old” materials to developing countries to help them speed development. This has in fact been occurring for some time to one extent or another. Americans old enough to remember soda pop in returnable bottles might be surprised to find them still in use when visiting third world countries. When a factory in the West modernizes, its obsolete equipment often goes overseas.

Back in the 1970s, when Farmer wrote his book, he suggested a good way to repurpose old vehicles would be to unload them on beaches off India. He speculated the cars would soon be repaired and placed back in good service. Now, it’s hardly fair to call India a third world country anymore. But there are some older technologies still in service there, and this includes gaming consoles once dominant in our marketplace 20 or 30 years ago.

Eric Lai over at PCWorld reports on Derek Lomas, a grad student who stumbled across the old style consoles while on an internship in Bangalore. The system Lomas discovered in the marketplace there is a knock-off of the old Nintendo NES system, an 8 bit console. The system takes NES cartridges and hooks up to television sets. Lomas had the brainy idea of adapting the unit for an über-cheap computer.

This idea makes a lot of sense for developing markets. Most households in developing countries, regardless of socioeconomic status, already have television sets. The monitor in any portable computer system can be the single most expensive component. Therefore, providing just the guts of a computer and using a television as the monitor is simply brilliant, especially for homes with very low incomes.

Lomas documents the discovery in his blog here. Jerry Kronenberg at the Boston Herald reports Lomas participated in the International Design Summit at MIT this month, birthplace of the One Laptop Per Child idea, otherwise known as the “$100 laptop.” Lomas’ team hopes to add memory to the device, a keyboard, and cell phone access for Internet browsing.

Nicholas Negroponte, who spearheaded OLPC at MIT, is another professor who has put big ideas for developing countries into action, like Richard Farmer back in the day. If Lomas is successful, he’ll be following in good footsteps.

References:
Kronenberg, J. (2008, August 4). Designers on quest to build $12 computer. [Online]. Retrieved August 9, 2008 from http://news.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/
view/2008_08_04_Designers_on_quest_to_build__12_computer/

Handheld Learning Conference, 2007

With all the talk recently surrounding the educational uses of handheld gaming platforms such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, it makes sense that practitioners have banded together to form a conference on the topic. Andy Pulman blogs about the Handheld Learning Conference and Exhibition, 2007, that is taking place next week in London. A press release that Andy references gives more details.

Here’s a couple of key paragraphs in that press release from the Nintendo folks:

David Yarnton, General Manager, Nintendo UK says:
“The Handheld Learning Conference and Exhibition brings together so many thought-leaders it is natural that Nintendo gets involved with this important educational conference. As the biggest supplier of handheld entertainment, Nintendo is already driving learning across all age groups with its products, in particular the Touch Generations series, including Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? and Big Brain Academy. So we’re delighted to play our part, furthering the developing role of handheld devices in learning.”

Graham Brown-Martin, Managing Director, Handheld Learning, says:
“The majority of gaming devices – and particularly those by Nintendo – all feature local and wide area networking capabilities, which are exploited by its software titles to enable positive social interaction and networks. Whilst the world has been focussing on the $100 laptop Nintendo had already developed one in the form of the Nintendo DS.”

Ouch. I think the OLPC people might be asking: Where is the keyboard for the DS? Anyways, that’s an argument for another day. Additional details on the conference are available at the conference’s official website.

On a side note, despite our noting the increased discussion surrounding the educational uses of the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP in Japan, Gaming Today informs us that both products have been banned from use on Japanese airlines. Fortunately, other airlines have not followed suit. My oldest will be glad to hear this, flying back from New England later this week, loaded down with several books and both mini consoles to fight the boredom and wait out potential delays.

Aussie Media Notes Educational Uses of DS & PSP in Japan

I’ve discussed previously the educational uses of the Nintendo DS, most recently concerning the trend in Japan. Now, The Daily Telegraph (Australia) has an interesting article regarding the use of the DS and the PSP in Japanese schools. Here are some benefits being realized:

* At just one-fifteenth of the cost of a personal computer — around Y17,000 ($A171.38) each — the DS is an economical teaching tool … results in an initial trial showed the English vocabulary of junior high school students using the DS had soared by 40 per cent.
* Saito Miyauchi, 12, approaches teacher Raita Hirai with a bashful smile as he holds up his DS screen. “That’s great!” the teacher tells him after Saito has topped the class by doing 45 multiplications in 15 minutes.
* “The badminton club keeps me busy. But with DS, I can study everywhere, and quickly.”
* “The benefit is that students can look at, hear and write an English word at the same time. With conventional flash cards, you would have two of them at the best,” …“With the game console, you can feel the fast speed and tempo. I think it matches today’s children,” [a school official] said, adding the board had received no complaints from parents.

Lest all the praise be reserved for the DS, the PSP garners its own admirers in the article. A pilot project in Osaka is soon to expand from 38 fourth graders to 800 or more students:

Teacher Toyokazu Takeuchi did not need to print out or check tests. Instead, his own console received real-time data showing which students were making mistakes and what mistakes they were making.
“This is e-learning made in Japan — traditional efforts in reading, writing and calculating coupled with the power of information technology and game machines,” he said.

Finally, the article concludes with the possibility that, since portable gaming devices are so inexpensive, they may possibly serve as an introduction to educational computing in developing countries. In the meantime, the Japanese seem to be enjoying the educational benefit of the DS and the PSP just fine.

References:
Videogames pushed in class. (2007, September 21). The Daily Telegraph. [Online]. Available: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/
0,22049,22456665-5006007,00.html

Halo 3 and OLPC

Two articles are of interest today. One, from the New York Times, reports on the slam dunk that Halo 3 is for Microsoft. Over a million people have already pre-ordered a copy of Halo 3 at one of three price levels: $60, $70, or the $130 version complete with game helmet. Author Seth Schiesel sums up the money involved this way:

The Halo series, set in a future when humanity is battling a hostile alien race, has sold more than 14.8 million copies since its debut in 2001, making it one of the most successful game franchises. The last major game in the series, Halo 2, set a record in 2004 for first-day sales of any entertainment product, generating more than $125 million in the United States in its first 24 hours.

Halo 3 is expected to rake in around $150 million on its first day, a sum surpassing comparable products in other media such as books and movies.

The other big article deals with videogames only in passing, but it also focuses on the polar opposite of big game development, and big money. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal ran a give and take between the One Laptop Per Child organization’s Walter Bender and the co-founder of eMachines, Stephen Dukker. Mr. Dukker also leads a start-up company called NComputing that offers software for inexpensive computer labs. Although few details are revealed in the dialogue, it appears NComputing can offer software for virtual workstations running in the neighborhood of $11/terminal. Mr. Dukker says, “The NComputing solution essentially taps the unused power of a regular desktop PC and enables seven students to use it simultaneously.”

The OLPC has caught my interest here before due to the fact some of the software programs in the distributed prototypes are game-oriented, thus maximizing learning potential. No indication is given if NComputing also offers gaming software in its product. Interestingly, Mr. Dukker brings up several of the oft-heard criticisms of the OLPC project (the money could be better spent elsewhere; it’s not really a $100 laptop; the countries involved have to order huge bulk quantities, etc.), giving the dialogue a tone of debate at times.

It’s an interesting exchange because wherever low cost computing goes, so too will the need for affordable pedagogical software (aka, instructional videogames). OLPC and NComputing are both worth watching from this perspective. I’ll be intrigued to read the research on new software developed for developing world platforms. And I’ll also be interested if any educational efforts come out of Halo 3. Certainly Halo 3 won’t be played on the OLPC product anytime soon (nor was this ever intended). But, perhaps the new game’s capabilities can be put to good use in a future educational product someday.

References:
Schiesel, S. (2007, September 24). Gamers, on your marks: Halo 3 arrives. The New York Times. [Online.] Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/arts/24halo.html?ref=business

Will low-cost laptops help kids in developing countries? (2007, September 5). The Wall Street Journal. [Online.] Available: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118892795619917030.html

Games for the $100 Laptop

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, the brainchild of MIT Media Lab stalwart Nicholas Negroponte, has successfully rolled out working models in recent weeks. Currently costing around $175, the idea is to mass produce the laptops until they fall below the $100 range. They are marketed as educational devices for developing countries.

Since they are primarily for use in developing areas, the laptops are light on energy requirements, and can operate “off the grid.” Consequently, their design has taken a minimalist approach. The XO, as the OLPC product is called, uses an inexpensive AMD chip for the CPU, Linux for the OS, AbiWord for word processing, and Gnumeric for spreadsheets.

Since the laptop is aimed at children, educational gaming is a priority. The OLPC team leaders understand the power of gaming for education, and are actively seeking programmers to develop educational video games that can run on the device. The Boston Globe ran an article last month detailing a “block party” of programmers who got together to whip out some code for educational gaming on the XO.

Game jam coordinator Mel Chua said it’s just the first of several such gatherings to produce useful software and content for the XO laptop. “We’re hoping to have music jams, movie jams, curriculum jams,” Chua said.

The laptops also include tools for making new software. As a result, users will be able to write their own programs tailored to specific needs. They can even hold their own game jams. Already, a group of XO users in Brazil are planning a programming spree for October.

Article author Hiawatha Bray indicated there are already some games out there for the XO such as Block Party, a Tetris clone. Educational media superpower Sesame Workshop is busy testing games for the XO and envisions specialized software for specific countries in which the XO is distributed.

The best quotes in the article came from Kent Quirk, CTO of Cognitoy LLC.

“Games can’t teach everything,” said Quirk, who will participate in the jam, “but they can make some kinds of learning a whole lot more palatable.”

[G]ames are high on the wish list, because of their potential as teaching tools. “Learning happens when you’re in this sort of pleasurable state of frustration,” said Quirk. “The best games put you in that state and keep ratcheting up the difficulty . . . games are the best platform for certain kinds of learning.”

References

Bray, H. (2007, June 9). Let the games begin. Boston Globe. [Online]. Available: http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/bd/Let_the_games_begin_-
_The_Boston_Globe.pdf