Cambridge, February 2006 - The $100 laptop, first announced by Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the Media Lab at MIT at the World Economic Forum in January, is an ultra-low-cost, full-featured computer designed to dramatically enhance children's primary and secondary education worldwide. It is the central project of the nonprofit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association, which aims to equip the world's schoolchildren and their teachers with a personal, portable, connected computer.
"Children are the greatest natural resource of any country, and educating these children is at the root of solving our largest and most complex problems," said Negroponte. "Yet the best education may not come from sitting in a traditional classroom, but rather through independent interaction and exploration. The development of a $100 laptop will now make this possible for all kids - especially those in developing nations. It will redefine how we 'learn learning.'"
OLPC is a Delaware-based, nonprofit organization created by faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy-efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal is to start at approximately $100 and then steadily decrease.
