MIAMI--BUSINESS WIRE--One
Laptop per Child OLPC, a nonprofit organization whose mission is
to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education,
has been awarded a bid by Plan
Ceibal to provide 90,000 XO laptops for high school students in
Uruguay. This is the first time the OLPC XO laptops have been
specifically designed for high school-aged students and represents a
major expansion in the learning program that will have a global impact.
Plan Ceibal has provided a connected laptop to every primary school
student in Uruguay with 380,000 XOs and will now begin to expand the
highly successful One Laptop per Child program to its high schools.
The XO high school laptop XO HS has the same industrial design as the
original XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor, it will provide 2X the speed
of the XO 1.0, 4X DRAM memory and 4X FLASH memory. The XO high school
laptop is designed with a larger keyboard better suited to the larger
hands and fingers of older students. It will feature the
learning-focused Sugar
user interface together with the Gnome Desktop Environment to provide a
dual-boot Linux operating system with office productivity tools.
The XO HS laptops will be delivered with age-appropriate learning
programs adapted to the scholastic needs of secondary schools. A new
color variation for the laptop’s case will be an option for the high
school model.
The XO has been designed to work in the places that need it the most. It
has a rugged surface which makes it well-suited for remote classrooms
and daily transportation between home and school, uses three times less
electricity than other laptops and can be powered by alternate sources
like solar panels.
Deliveries of the XO high school edition laptops will begin in September
2010.
About the One Laptop per Child
One Laptop per Child OLPC at http://www.laptop.org
is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others
from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop
computers that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the
world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
