OLPC goodness (finally)
Ok, so if you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my digs at the OLPC folks for their somewhat slow delivery of my G1G1 XO laptop. Well, it finally arrived and after a few days of serious OLPC geekin’ I handed it off to its intended recipient, my 8-year-old son.
First off, if you were thinking (like I was) that an XO would make a cool grown-up geek toy, you’d be wrong. First off, it’s small… really small. The membrane keyboard is icky and to put it bluntly, the system is — lets face it — slow. Oh, and you look dorky carrying it around.
But it’s still neat.
It’s got a whole bunch of built-in applications (called “activities”) like a word processor (based on AbiWord), web browser (based on Gecko) and a number of programs that are all clearly educational, most of which I haven’t checked out yet. I did dig the sound sampling Measure activity and of course I found the Terminal activity most useful since the whole thing is Linux based.
By far the slickest feature of the XO is its collaboration abilities designed primarily for use in a classroom setting. This allows you to share almost any activity with anyone else. The problem here is that although its possible to configure a stand-alone XO to “collaborate” over the ‘net at large (it uses the Jabber protocol for this) I wasn’t sure setting this up on my kid’s computer would be such a good idea.
Anyway, I’m getting off track here. I gave the thing to Ryan and after pursuing the Record activity (the XO has a built in camera and mic) and some of the audio activities, he found the EToys activity which is a sort of a SmallTalk/Squeak development environment and he’s working (with some help) through the tutorial challenges.
“Can we play ‘cars’ again, Dad?” Aw hell yeah! Brings a tear to the eye, it does.
At this point I’m not really sure how long his interest will last. Will it really catch on (”Look, Dad, I’ve created the logic here in SmallTalk so if Santa comes through with some Mindstorms…”) or will the XO will go to that place where all the Leap stuff has gone that we’ve gotten over the years?
Fun to watch though.