Giulia D’Amico, Vice President of Business Development at One Laptop per Child Association (OLPCA) launches the OLPC XO Learning System, a user interface optimized for Children’s learning on Android Tablets. Vivitar is licencing XO Learning to launch their first OLPC XO Tablet in all WalMart stores in the USA by the end of Spring 2013. The initial Vivitar OLPC XO tablet features a 1.6Ghz dual-core (my guess Rockchip RK3066), 1024×600 screen, and the price is going to be very competitive (perhaps $99?), the target for WalMart is to reach all the Children in the USA in the next few months with this OLPC XO Tablet.
Every child has dreams and XO Learning directs the child’s passion, creativity and energy for these dreams into a new user interface that has 12 dreams. Such dreams include “I want to be” an artist, a musician and a scientist. Each dream features a rich learning experience and applications, books, games and videos that allow children ages 3 to 12 to naturally explore their dreams and learn at the same time.
“The challenge in computing and education is to use the technology to develop new ways for children to learn. The rich content of the dreams allows the child’s natural passion to be directed into learning experiences,” said Giulia D’Amico, the lead designer of XO Learning. OLPCA teamed with the legendary designer Yves Behar of Fuse Project and his team to create the XO Learning user interface and cover.
The content in XO Learning has been curated and selected for age-appropriateness and learning value by OLPCA, in collaboration with Common Sense Media, the leading non-profit organization dedicated to helping parents and teachers make informed decisions about media. Common Sense Media offers more than 18,000 media ratings and reviews based on both robust educational research and child development guidelines. XO Learning also offers a full range of parental controls and user IDs for up to three children, a dashboard where the child or the parent can review usage, types of content and the skills the child is developing. Press a single icon and XO Learning switches from English to Spanish with all new content depending on the language. Additional languages will be available in future releases.
Giulia D’Amico, OLPC Vice President of Business Development, unboxes and talks about the all-new XO-4 Touch One Laptop Per Child laptop, featuring the new Marvell Armada PXA2128 dual-core 1.2Ghz 40nm processor, Marvell 8787 WiFi chip and the Neonode IR Touch touchscreen technology. The OLPC XO-4 Touch now also features a HDMI output. Currently still running Fedora Linux based Sugar OS, the OLPC is thinking to port Sugar to Android to use on all OLPC Laptop/Tablet devices during 2013. Thus far, OLPC has shipped over 2.8 Million Laptops to children in schools worldwide. Australia is going to be the first country to deploy over 55 thousand OLPC XO-4 Touch laptop/tablets in the months to come.
The One Laptop Per Child foundation presents the final design for the OLPC sub-$100 Tablet with a 8″ 1024×768 capacitive LCD touch screen, a touch screen optimized version of Sugar Linux. The thin screen protector doubles as a solar charger. Once countries order millions of these, the price can definitely be below $100.
Interview with Yves Behar, the designer of the OLPC XO-1, about design, about technology, business, non-profit, consumer electronics design philosophy.
She’s the manager of Learning at One Laptop Per Child, she provides some insights into how the Laptops can be measured to be successfully deployed to children in schools around the world.
Daniel Drake is working on deploying OLPC all over the world. He provides technical support, training the local technical teams, how to repair laptops, how to setup the school servers and more.
Christoph Derndorfer is the managing editor at the unofficial http://olpcnews.com website and SJ Klein is the director of outreach, community content coordinator at One Laptop Per Child.
The OLPC Summit is underway in San Francisco for the third year. Programmers, hardware engineers, teachers, collaborators, volunteers from around the world gather in San Francisco to prepare the deployment of millions more laptops to the worlds children, to improve education, giving everyone in the world the equal access to information and equal opportunity.
