One Laptop Per Child Talks

Presentations on the One Laptop Per Child, Children's Machine XO by OLPC's leadership, including MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, transcribed for non-commercial study and investigation, commentary and criticism.

One Laptop Per Child on 60 Minutes - Transcribed

Posted in Nicholas Negroponte, Walter Bender

Famed reporter Lesley Stahl of CBS News profiled the One Laptop Per Child organization on "60 Minutes" - America's premier new program. She focused on MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte's progress with One Laptop Per Child, his dream of one-to-one computing as an educational boost, a way for children in the developing world to "learn learning". Walter Bender was also interviewed.

Ms. Stahl had on-location reports from OLPC testing in Brazil and with 13 million viewers on average, the coverage of OLPC was a major boost in profile for the project.

Leslie Stahl: Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT had a dream, in it every child on the planet had his own a computer. In that way he figured children from the most impoverished places; from desert to jungles and slums could become educated and part of the modern world, poor kids would have new possibilities.

It was a big dream, Negroponte thought he had a chance of actually seeing it happen if he could help invent a really inexpensive laptop. So 2 years ago he founded a non-profit organisation called 'One Laptop per child'. He recruited a cadre of geeks and voila, the $100 laptop, designed specifically for poor children, was born. But let's go back to the beginning when Negroponte first got his idea in Cambodia.

The idea came to him in a remote village, a 4 hour drive on a dirt road from the nearest town, it's as far from MIT as you can get, they don't even have running water. Negroponte and his family founded a school here in 1999, putting in a satellite dish and generators, then they gave the children laptops. Instantly school became a lot more popular.

Child sings: How's the weather? It's sunny.

Leslie Stahl: Kids who had never seen a computer before now crossing the digital divide. Nicholas Negroponte was knocked out.

Nicholas Negroponte:: The first English word of every child in that village was Google.

Leslie Stahl: (Laughs).

Nicholas Negroponte: The village has no electricity, no telephone, no television and the children take home laptops that are connected broadband to the internet.

Leslie Stahl: When they take the laptops home the kids often teach the whole family how to use it

Nicholas Negroponte: Families loved it because it was the brightest light source in the house.

Leslie Stahl: Because they had no electricity.

Nicholas Negroponte: Talk about a metaphor and reality simultaneously - it just illuminated that household.

Teacher: We have to go to study computer now, yes? Good.

Children: Yes!

Leslie Stahl: Once the computers were there, school attendance went way up.

Nicholas Negroponte: This year, for example, 50% more children showed up for first grade.

Leslie Stahl: In Cambodia?

Nicholas Negroponte: Yeah, because the kids who were there last year told the other kids "You know, school is pretty cool."

Leslie Stahl: Negroponte wanted this for all schoolchildren everywhere, but he realised conventional computers were too expensive and so his dream of a $100 laptop was born. And this is it: a low budget computer for children. Children like these second graders in a poor school in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Each child has been given his or her own machine as part of a test for the Brazilian government to see if they should buy them for all their schoolchildren.

Leslie Stahl: This must be pretty exciting for you to see these children?

Nicholas Negroponte: It's very exciting, It's very gratifying. It's been two years in the making.

Leslie Stahl: The children seem to especially like the built-in camera that takes stills and video.

Leslie Stahl: She's taking a picture of us taking a picture of her?

Nicholas Negroponte: Right.

Leslie Stahl: It also has WiFi.

Leslie Stahl: She's on the web?

Nicholas Negroponte: Yeah, she seems to be on the web.

Leslie Stahl: Negroponte's idea was that kids don't need teachers to learn the computer: they can pick it up by experimenting on their own or, as in this case, with help from a friend.

Nicholas Negroponte: That is what we're doing, is that that kid is showing this kid. That is key, they get it instantly. It takes a ten-year-old child about three minutes.

Leslie Stahl: And you're talking about children who have never worked on a computer?

Nicholas Negroponte: Children who have never, in some cases, who have never seen electricity.

Leslie Stahl: The Laptops are for sale in minimum lots of 250,000. Each costs $176, though Negroponte expects the price will go down to $100 within two years.

Leslie Stahl: You go into countries in which there may not be enough food, where the children may not have good enough education to even teach them to read; why a laptop? It almost sounds like a luxury for these people who need so much more than that.

Nicholas Negroponte: Let me take two countries: Pakistan and Nigeria. 50% of the children in both those countries are not in school.

Leslie Stahl: At all?

Nicholas Negroponte: At all. They have no schools, they don't even have trees under which a teacher might stand.

Leslie Stahl: You're saying give them a laptop even if they don't go to school?

Nicholas Negroponte: Especially if they don't go to school! If they don't go to school, this is school in a box.

Leslie Stahl: Negroponte took a leave of absence from MIT two years ago and has done little else but work on this ever since.

Leslie Stahl: So Nicholas Negroponte, what's in it for you?

Nicholas Negroponte: Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Interviewer: He says it's purely humanitarian and non-profit. With start-up money from Google and other big companies he assembled a team of engineers and programmers to come up with something that could stand up to third world conditions.

Nicholas Negroponte: You can pour water on the keyboard, you can dip the base into a bathtub, you can carry it in the rain. It's more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn't even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: you know, dirt, sand; I mean there's no place for it to go into the machine.

Leslie Stahl: Again, designed for the child.

Nicholas Negroponte: Yes.

Leslie Stahl: It looks like a toy on purpose, but it's a serious computer with many innovations. For example: it's the first laptop with a screen which you can use outdoors in full sunlight. Walter bender, the president of software on the project says there are loads of new features. You can draw on it.

Walter Bender: You can use it as a pen.

Leslie Stahl: Or compose music.

Leslie Stahl: It actually looks like an animal. These are meant to look like ears, right?

Walter Bender: Right these ears are the way the laptop communicates to the rest of the world, so the laptop listens with these ears, those are radio antennas.

Leslie Stahl: I don't have that on my computer.

Walter Bender: No, and one of the reasons why this computer has probably two or three times better WiFi range than your computer is because you don't have that.

Interviewer: It has two to three times better range?

Walter Bender: Better range than your $3,000 laptop.

Leslie Stahl: How long does the battery work?

Walter Bender: By the time we're done with our tuning the battery should last ten or twelve hours with heavy use.

Leslie Stahl: If the battery does run out and you live in a thatched hut in the middle of nowhere you can charge it up with a crank or a salad spinner.

Leslie Stahl: So you do this for about a minute or two?

Walter Bender: A minute or two and you get ten or twenty minutes of reading.

Wayan Vota: The 'One laptop per child' computer is a computing revolution.

Leslie Stahl: Wayan Vota is director of 'Geek Corps' a type of Peace Corps that brings technology to developing countries. He's so fascinated by this computer he has a website devoted to it.

Wayan Vota: It's an entire change in the way that you use computers, at the same time ...

Leslie Stahl: You can pour a glass of water on it.

Wayan Vota: Yes, it's water proof. I can't wait to type outside for hours with a computer without worrying about dust or heat so the 'One Laptop per Child' technology is cutting edge. Its clock-stopping hot.

Leslie Stahl: But he doesn't buy Negroponte's contention that kids can figure it out without a teacher.

Wayan Vota: If you hand a child a violin or a piano they can make noise with it, right? But will they be able to make music? And if you give a child a computer, they'll be able to operate the computer but will they really be able to learn without having a teacher, whether it's formal or informal to help them along that learning path?

Leslie Stahl: He says there are other problems. For poor countries like Cambodia there are costs beyond the price of the computer like satellites to connect to the internet. And what about theft?

Leslie Stahl: What says an older child isn't just going to swipe this thing? It seems like it's inevitable.

Nicholas Negroponte: We've spent a lot of time on security. If this is stolen from a child, within 24 hours it stops working, it will not be useable.

Leslie Stahl: Oh, so everybody's testing new computers up here?

Leslie Stahl: But lately 'One' laptop has had to contend with a new challenge: competition. This lab in Sao Paolo is testing two other laptops the Brazilian government is thinking of buying for school children; Including one made in India and Negroponte's biggest competitor: the 'Classmate' by the giant chip-maker Intel.

Leslie Stahl: What do you think of this one?

Tester: It's just like a small laptop, a miniature laptop.

Leslie Stahl: So it's purely humanitarian; you did it only to help the poor kids around the world. Why did other companies, for-profit companies, decide they wanted a piece of the action?

Nicholas Negroponte: Because the numbers are so large, they look at the numbers and they say 'If we're not in those, we're toast.'

Leslie Stahl: Here in Brazil there are 55 million schoolchildren, most of them poor, many of them live in favelas like this one. In China there are 200 million. Worldwide, Nicholas Negroponte say the potential number of kids who could get his laptop is over a billion: a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Intel and other high-tech companies.

Leslie Stahl: Intel gave every student in this class in Mexico a 'Classmate' which Negroponte believes is part of an effort to kill him off.

Nicholas Negroponte: It's predatory.

Leslie Stahl: At a recent lecture at MIT he accused Intel of dumping, of going to the same governments he's trying to sell to and offering the 'Classmate' below cost.

Nicholas Negroponte: Intel should be ashamed of themselves. It's just shameless.

Leslie Stahl: Craig Barrett is Intel's Chairman of the Board.

Leslie Stahl: Negroponte believes that you're trying to drive him out of business.

Craig Barrett: We're not trying to drive him out of business, we're trying to bring capabilities to young people and it's more than just Intel. It's going to take the whole industry to do this.

Leslie Stahl: Barrett flies around the world bringing computers to schools in places like Malinalco, Mexico.

Craig Barrett: Do you like the computers?

Teacher: (Translates into Spanish).

Schoolchildren: Si.

Leslie Stahl: He says that, just like Negroponte, Intel just wants to help kids get affordable computers and that they would be willing to reach an accommodation with 'One' laptop.

Craig Barrett: There are lots of opportunities for us to work together. That's why when you say 'This is competition' and we're 'trying to drive them out of business' this is crazy.

Leslie Stahl: Not to Negroponte who says the rivalry goes back to when he first introduced the 'One' laptop and Barrett dismissed it as a gadget. That infuriated Negroponte who says the heart of it is that the 'One' laptop uses chips made by AMD; Intel's biggest competitor.

Nicholas Negroponte: Intel and AMD fight viciously and we're just sort of caught in the middle.

Leslie Stahl: To prove that Intel has targeted his machine Negroponte gave us some documents Intel sent to the government of Nigeria.

Leslie Stahl: And I want you to look at it.

Craig Barrett: This is an Intel marketing document there's no question about that.

Leslie Stahl: The document outlines the shortcoming of the 'One Laptop per Child' approach and lists the supposedly stronger points of the 'Classmate'.

Leslie Stahl: So somebody at Intel sees this as direct competition, clearly?

Craig Barrett: Well, somebody at Intel was comparing the 'Classmate' PC with another device being offered in the marketplace. That's the way our business works.

Leslie Stahl: For NN it's not just business, it's personal. It's about his dream, his baby.

Leslie Stahl: Has Intel hurt you in the mission?

Nicholas Negroponte: Yes, Intel has hurt the mission enormously.

Leslie Stahl: These laptops are prototypes; to get them into mass production, Negroponte needs at least three million orders which he thought he'd have by now. But so far he has lots of promises but no definite orders and he blames Intel. He spends almost all his time now lobbying government officials, going from one country to the next.

Leslie Stahl: I heard that you travel more than 300 days a year.

Nicholas Negroponte: Yes it's true, sadly. I travel ...

Leslie Stahl: There are only 365 days in a year.

Nicholas Negroponte: I actually travel about 330 of them.

Leslie Stahl: He says he's confident he'll get his orders even though he's about to face even more competition as other companies are working on low-cost laptops. That will result in more kids getting them which is, after all, what Negroponte said he wanted in the first place.

Leslie Stahl: You know, you call your project 'One Laptop per Child' and you mean that every kid in the entire world is going to have a laptop. Is that realistic?

Nicholas Negroponte: If I was realistic I wouldn't have started this project, ok, so it's not realistic but we'll get close.