Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.
These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the US$188 laptops -- people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books -- can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.
At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them -- if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.
"It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spinoff program One Laptop Per Child, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.
Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at US$100 each.
In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India -- and a full-court press from Intel Corp's more power-hungry Classmate.
ONE STEP AHEAD
But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.
Mass production began last month and Negroponte says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.
Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyer of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.
Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan early next year through "Give One, Get One," a US-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which people buy a pair of laptops for US$399 and donate one or both.
REVOLUTION
The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.
"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates -- animals without backbones.
"What they work with most is the [built-in] camera. They love to record," said Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot project to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.
Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this hamlet of 800 people were carried by tourists coming for festivals or the local Inca ruins.
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