Understanding the mission
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD MISSION The One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) is a non‐profit organization based at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston, USA. OLPC was set up to oversee the creation of a cheap, affordable educational device for use in the third world. Its current focus is on the development, construction and deployment of the XO‐1 laptop to promote children's education in developing nations.
The mission Statement of OLPC is: “To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low‐cost, low‐power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self‐empowered learning”.
OLPC claim that their laptop, named the "XO", is "a potent learning tool created expressly for children in developing countries, living in some of the most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience for every aspect of this non‐profit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra‐low‐cost, power‐efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning". Most observers would no disagree that: “OLPC has created the XO laptop to be very low cost, robust and powerful, beautiful and friendly. It has been designed explicitly for children of the elementary classes, the first one of its kind”. One of the distinctive features is that the laptops automatically connect to each other, allowing the children to collaborate in all the activities that they find on the laptop.
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