One Child One Laptop Followup

I first profiled the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project over at my previous site, but I wanted to highlight an interesting development. For the unfamiliar, OLPC is a program started by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte that is attempting to design and distribute a low-cost laptop for children in third-world and otherwise educationally-underdeveloped locations. So far, they have created a device that costs a mere $200, and is in many ways superior to commercially available laptops.

Here's where it gets interesting: An international group of designers and graduate students have stumbled across a TV/computer hybrid that is sold on the streets of India for...Twelve dollars. There's a part of this story though that makes my little geek heart sing: The twelve dollar computer is based on the original, 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and even accepts the original system's cartridges. The people involved with the project are hoping to be able to add internet access and a few other upgrades, while still keeping the final retail price around $15.

Geek factor aside, this project has the potential to vastly increase the access to computers and, by extension, education, for many of the world's less fortunate. Of course, the Nintendo Computer (Ed. note: Feel free to come up with a better nickname) does not make the OLPC program irrelevant, nor does either MIT-sired effort have much to do with the other. To say nothing of the fact that OLPC already has a laptop that they can put into children's hands, more importantly the NES computer requires a television to plug into. So while a NES computer might be a great option for a family in India (where half of all households own a TV), it wouldn't do much good in, say, Africa.

(Ed. note: For some reason, Blogger isn't letting me upload photos. Click here for a collection of photographs from one of the people involved in the project.)