Bender said the machines come loaded with children's books in local languages, along with encyclopedias and more.
Uruguay, a small South American country, is one of about a dozen developing nations that signaled interest in participating. The first laptops, along with a wireless Internet connection, were the gift of the One Laptop Per Child project, a nonprofit foundation that has received funding from several companies, including Red Hat Inc, Google Inc and News Corp.
On May 10, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez handed over the "XO" laptops to the school serving Villa Cardal, a community set amid dairy cattle pastures and farmlands about 90km north of Montevideo.
Uruguay has fully embraced the laptop project amid high hopes to have laptop computers in the hands of all elementary school students before 2009.
The Villa Cardal pupils' enthusiasm is something program supporters hope to see repeated worldwide: Other countries that have expressed interest include Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda and Thailand.
Galain said he now sees some students engaged in learning who weren't before.
"Some children who didn't like to even write are now getting used to working with a word processing program," he said.
Still he warned his pupils the newfangled computers wouldn't mean escape from the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic: "Nobody believes the children will stop using pencils and notebooks."
RSS