First Impressions on the OLPC XO Laptop
Last night Dennis Gilmore, Build Engineer for OLPC, spoke at Bradley University. Since I live 3 blocks from Bradley and have been following OLPC off and on since the beginning, I couldn’t pass this up (even though I was the token old guy in a classroom mostly full of college undergrads).
Dennis had brought 3 XOs with him for the students to play with. He gave a good introductory presentation on OLPC, XO, and Sugar. Not much new for anyone who has been following the project, but I did learn that the XO runs each activity’s process in a different uid/gid. The students asked lots of good questions and were obviously excited about OLPC.
Read on if you care to hear my personal experience with an XO… 
First Impressions of the XO & Sugar
I played with a Spanish language XO for a bit. They’re beautiful little machines and smaller than I expected. While the plastic that made up most of the case felt like a cheap plastic toy, the overall machine felt very solid. The pop-up antennas were surprisingly strong. I think they just always looked fragile to me in photos.
The rubberized keyboard felt nearly indestructible, but I found it fairly hard to type on. If you don’t push the keys straight on, its easy to just mash a bit of rubber without actually making a keystroke.
The Sugar interface and activities were very cool if a bit sluggish. Everything I tried Just Worked including networked activities between the XOs. Since I was using a Spanish language version, I quickly came to appreciate how useful Sugar’s extensive use of iconography is.
Pippy!
After poking at a few apps, I quickly made my way to Pippy, the integrated Python development environment. Its pre-populated with fun little example programs and I was playing with the built-in camera and generating sound effects in 30 seconds.
However, Pippy isn’t an interactive python interpreter, so I quickly switched to ipython to explore further. Unfortunately Pippy invisibly manipulates sys.path, so it took me a bit to get the Pippy example scripts working in ipython.
Once I got the sys.path worked out, programming on the XO was a joy. I quickly had my XO playing off-key chords and could easily poke around the vast number of included python libraries.
The Good
The XO seems like an amazing educational tool. It is not a general purpose sub-laptop like the EeePC. Anyone hoping to get one to look cool at the local Starbucks is going to be sorely disappointed. Everything about it seems to be engineered with kids and education in mind, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be a revolutionary educational tool.
The Bad
One concern I had was that Python is by-design an English programming language. I’m not so worried about function and library names as I am about docstrings. I wonder if OLPC has any plans to translate docstrings.
Without translated documentation, I don’t know how OLPC expects Pippy to be useful outside of English speaking countries. Expecting children to learn English as well as programming seems a bit presumptuous to me.
The Ugly
Its been said before, but I’ll say it again: the XO is sluggish. Applications load slowly and animations aren’t smooth. The good news is that children may not even notice, but I hope the situation can be improved through software optimization so the current generation of XOs aren’t banished to sub-standard performance forever.
Ok, one more good…
I’m more excited about the OLPC project than ever before and hope to meet up with Dennis Gilmore in the future! I’ll have to post again once I get Sugar running in Qemu.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:12 pm
> Expecting children to learn English as well as programming
> seems a bit presumptuous to me.
It is much easier for a child to learn language. If they would program they will need it anyway.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
@ph:
It just seems like we should set the bar to entry as low as possible. Hopefully you’re right and the language barrier will be insignificant.
As a native English speaker I really have no clue how big of a deal it is.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
It all depends on the age of the child — the younger you are, the easier it is for you to pick up language.
I’m a native English speaker, but my parents moved to France when I was four years old, and I grew up going to French school. So I grew up bilingual — I spoke English at home, and French in school. I was four, so I not only picked up French easily, I also picked up a French accent. (When speaking French — my accent speaking English is the same American accent that my parents have).
It wouldn’t be as easy for kids to pick up English from *just* written resources without hearing it spoken. Immersion helps, a lot. But it’s still easier to pick up a language as a kid than as an adult — I’m an example of that fact.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pm
And ph is right that kids wanting to go into programming will need a good command of English eventually. It’s fast becoming (or already is) the international language for many professional fields, including programming. So having something give them an impetus to get started early will help them overall, I think.
March 5th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
And who exactly are the kids this is meant for?
I would hope not kids in the 3rd world, where they do not even have basic classrooms.
Best laid plans of mice and men … ahh But then again what is it really worth if people sit in their ivory towers and plan solutions for the halflings without ever finding out what the real problems are.
The question to ask is what would I REALLY NEED if I was in that situation.
Thoughts?
Cheers mate!
March 5th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
@Alejandro:
At $200, the laptop is probably the most economical educational resource as it replaces books, calculators, pens, pencils, reams of paper, etc. Hopefully the price will drop further and the economics will become more apparent.
There may not even be sufficient educational resources available in the native languages of all children.
As far as non-educational needs such as food, shelter, and healthcare, I would hope those would be addressed in areas the XOs are being deployed. OLPC is an education focused NGO. Other NGOs are attempting to meet non-educational needs. If you feel other efforts are more important than OLPC, I’m sure no one would argue with you donating to them!
March 6th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
You know, a great part of the world lives on less than $5 a day which is barely enough to cover sustenance needs.
I guess I’ll be blunt and say it. Its all a waste of time. The question one has to ask is this been done to GENUINELY solve the problem or is it been done to feel good about oneself and feel like I am doing something cool.
There is really no use for a laptop when you do not have the basic needs for an effective educational system. But then again how can one really expect when there isn’t an understanding of what it is like to truly live in the 3rd world.
Imagine this, its like offering someone whose lost their job and their house is about to be foreclosed a timeshare to resort in Hilton Head, NC. My guess is that you’ll say its not the same thing. But it is, they are both great gifts that have nothing do not address the issue.
Besides there a lot cheaper technologies that could be applied effectively. Mobile devices have taken off in the rest of world and provide good bang for the buck. However, they are not sexy and not the kind of thing you can talk about at Starbucks on campuses and feel really really smart.
Here’s my advice. Its good and great to be helpful. But if one really wants to be helpful then one should realize that the people closest to the problem have better/effective ideas on what can and should be done. Then you can provide them the help they really need.
And not travel half way around the world to tsunami stricken areas to give them toiletries when the $20k that was spent on the trip could have been put to better use, a la GC. But then again I guess it was about the photo opp and the tourist opp.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
@Alejandro:
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree then as I’m afraid there’s no empirical data on the effectiveness of the OLPC program yet. My hope is that this is the tool that helps lift these children out of poverty permanently. I really truly believe it offers these children a unique opportunity that no other program I’ve heard of does.
I remember Microsoft, or perhaps Bill Gates in particular, recommending mobile devices as well. I can’t envision exactly how that would work, but I would be excited to see “competing” programs to OLPC start up. It can only mean more resources for the recipients of these ventures!
Concerning the tsunami trip I see great value in experiencing other cultures first hand. I hope that that first-hand experience would lead to an understanding of a culture that would change everyone involved for a lifetime.
In the specific instance of the trip you’re referring to, I really cannot say if the trip was “worth it” or not. I assume many such trips are not, but I must admit I have no way of backing up that assumption or quantifying the value of experiencing other cultures first-hand.