The goal of the One Laptop Per Child program is pretty simple:  every elementary/primary schoolchild in the world should have a personal computer. That’s still an unlikely target, but the scheme has achieved a major milestone in Uruguay.

As of this week, every child in a state-run primary school in a country now has one of the machines. In an amazing coincidence of timing, Uruguay’s Prime Minister handed over the last laptop 12 days before a general election.

(You do have to feel for the child who, as well as being at the center of a media scum, was briefly – and quite literally – the only kid in the country without a computer.)

The BBC reports that the cost of providing computers to 362,000 children (just short of $100 million) makes up a little short of 5 percent of the country’s education budget. Those costs, around $260 per child, include buying the machines (originally designed to cost $100, though that’s proved unworkable) plus maintenance costs, extending Internet access and training teachers.

The global scheme received something of a boost last year when Amazon began offering a deal by which its customers could pay $399 in return for which they got one laptop themselves and a second was donated for use overseas.

The machines, which run on a Linux-based system named Sugar, have been specially designed to be particularly sturdy and suitable for use in a variety of environments. However, The Economist notes that in some classes up to half of students have already broken the machines, while in poor areas there has been the heartbreaking image of children refusing to hand back their new machine when it needs repair.

Other problems included the first batch of laptops mistakenly being set to display in English rather than Spanish, and some schools reporting a limit to the number of machines which can connect to the Internet at once. Plans to run an upcoming national online test for 7-year-olds have also been somewhat undermined by the revelation that some rural schools will have to bus students to a location with decent Wi-Fi coverage.

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Entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 3:10 pm under Technology.

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