This laptop is so simple even a six-year-old can show you

My six-year-old son, Liam, and I recently attended a One Laptop Per Child networking event at the Marie Murphy school in Wilmette, IL. The event was put on by Chris Brown as part of a teacher professional development day. He invited area XO owners to come talk about our computers as well as have the opportunity to network with others in the community. One blogged about it here.

About 10-15 laptops were present at peak. We gathered around a large conference table in the resource room and quickly got to work. Liam was beyond excited to have so many “friends” show up on his neighborhood view.

We quickly “friended” everyone (by hovering on their icons and selecting “add as friend”) we could from the neighborhood view, then looked at the Group view to see all the colorful XOs on our screens. Shh, don’t tell Anastasia I had her laptop out while she was at school.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about bringing Liam. He’s only 6, it was a regular school day for him that he would miss, he’s bound to get bored, etc. etc. However, I thought it would be a good opportunity for him to share what he’s been learning and doing with his laptop. I figured a community of teachers would like to see what first graders might do with this technology. Plus, he was excited about the idea of coming, even though it meant missing school (and, of all things, library day!)

To be on the safe side, though, the night before I had him pick out a few books, games, and other activities and packed those into his backpack next to his friendly green laptop. You know, just in case.

What was I worried about?

Within the first twenty minutes, Liam turned to me and said “Mommy – can we make this a long meeting?”

Confused, I asked for clarification. “You know, a long meeting. Can we stay a while? I don’t want to go!”

To bookend that comment, he asked me at least a dozen times on the car ride home and later that day if we could “set up another meeting, just like that. I want to do another meeting.”

What was so fun? Well, for starters, everyone else had the same machine. Adding friends to the network was neat. Then, as teachers are so excellent at doing – everyone who talked to Liam treated him as though the things he had to say were interesting and important. And last, lucky for them and us -- what he had to say was interesting and important, and he was able to contribute in a positive way to the dialogue at the table about ways to use the XO with school children.

He showed the principal of the school how he can test himself on his spelling words using the Memorize activity. I had programmed in his spelling list, with one half of a pair jumbled. He had to match the jumbled word with its correctly spelled counterpart. He played with the various tamtams for a while, composing music on the fly with tamtam edit, something we hadn’t played with at home before.

He also showed one of the teachers a few things we’d been exploring with Pippy. Pippy is a front end to the Python programming language that includes some mini sample programs. Liam and I spent about 20 minutes a few nights before playing with Pippy, talking about how the ordered lines of instructions tell the computer exactly what to do, and if you edit the instructions – well, the computer is only as stupid as you are. It’ll do exactly what you tell it to do. While I don’t have any expectations that he’ll be programming at age 6 and 7, all of these activities like pippy and turtle are beginning to expose him to the concepts that underlie all computer systems – a series of instructions, executed in a specific order, with different types of commands. Heck, there are many grownups who don’t know this much about how computers work.

Liam also had fun working with George on the Acoustic Tape Measure activity. They had to work together to figure out the right order of events – who would launch the activity, who would invite the other participant, when to start the measuring, etc. Liam would scurry between his computer and George’s, evaluating settings and trying to determine the right way to do things. While we’re not positive we ever got an accurate reading, they were both very excited when the machines bzzt’d at each other and numbers appeared on screen. We decided to read up more about the activity and try it again at home.

What made the entire day worth it for me was the moment when I suddenly saw my child the way others see him. You know how usually you view your child(ren) in your own cloud of love and pride mixed up with an awareness of all his/her strengths and weaknesses and the baggage you carry from how they pestered you non-stop yesterday for a second lollipop/more time on the xbox/another drink of water before bed?

For a beautiful moment at Marie Murphy school that cold, wet day in February, it all fell away and I saw an excited little guy talking with no fear or hesitation to a group of adults gathered behind him, answering their questions and eagerly pointing out features or components to explore with them.

My six-year-old was demoing.

These laptops are magic. Put a child in front of them and watch it flow.

Comments

[Ken S]

Thanks for posting. I haven't decided if I'm going to drag my 5 year-old daughter to my first Seattle XO users group meeting this Sunday. She might enjoy it, but I really don't know. I think I'll let her choose, and see what happens - she's really into her laptop and likes showing it off, so I think she choose to go....

[Faith Williams]

I bought a couple of the OLPC computers with a grant we had for our preschool. I have not yet been able to figure out how best to use them, my ignorance no doubt. But both my most computerized son and my Mac computer friend have been unable to show me how little kids would use them, though they are attractive and the perfect size. Are there websites I should go to?

Faithmw@yahoo.com

[Ken S]

Faithmw,

It helps to have a motivated geek to tinker with the machine before unleashing it for kids. Find someone with a local users group - I imagine someone could help you configure them.

For more info - I suggest the OLPCnews forums (http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php) - where you'll be overwhelmed, but the info is in there. The big things I did to improve the experience for my daughter:

* De-activate the frame that appears when the cursor is in the corners
* Install some additional activities: Maze, Speak & Flipsticks come to mind
* Make a custom Memorize game (this requires patience)
* The Measure activity is fun to play with as well.

Browsing the web on the green machine - with the default browser or Opera (needs to be installed) - is not really for kids, IMHO. Flash website effectively don't work - so most educational websites (e.g. starfall.com are out - I use the XO and my daughter uses our iMac for flash websites).

ebooks have been a disappointment - the READ activity doesn't really hold her attention - she'd rather read a real book.

hope this help - check out the forums - have fun with the XOs!

[Karen Smith]

Faith - where are you located? If you're in the Chicago area, Liam, his 4 year old sister, and I would be happy to try to meet up and show you a few things. The OLPCNews.com forums that Ken posted are also a great resource. Additionally, I suggest the main OLPC forums: http://en.forum.laptop.org/index.php

and the project wiki (a wiki is a big shared notebook that many people can edit.)
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/The_OLPC_Wiki

I just compiled a list of OLPC resources for our Chicago area interest group, and it's located here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Chicago_Resources
Most large metro areas have a mailing list like the Chicago one has too.

And of course the laptop.org getting started page is a good place to start:
http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/start/

I agree that at first it's a little hard to figure out what you're supposed to do with these friendly little green machines, but I'll be honest, with about 30 minutes of tinkering on my part (albeit with a tech background/interest/lack of fear of technology) and 2.5 minutes of me showing the kids how to click the icons along the bottom to launch an activity, they were off and running.

I've posted about some great kids activities here on the OLPCNews forums. I'm trying to consolodate all those posts into this forum for caregivers that I am the moderator for, but I'm still getting my sea legs as I have no idea how to moderate on this particular forums software package. Check it out once you hit the forums.

Let us know how it goes!

[ken hargesheimer]

My XO has not arrived yet. I have been doing extensive research such as on here. My conclusion is that a computer user as most of us must do something hard to do: The XO takes a totally different mindset.

[George Dorner]

This was eerie! It's October 27 and I was checking the OLPCNews.com site, when this page of your blog popped up on my screen. I don't recall seeing this writeup before, though I did see your notes on the Chicago OLPC exchange.

I drive past Marie Murphy School fairly often and recall fondly the interchange with Liam while trying to measure how far we were from each other. Also, I have recounted that to a number of folks while talking about OLPC.

I hope all is well with you folks and that Liam is realizing some of the goals of the OLPC project. You, too!

George

[KayTi]

Thanks for the comment, George! I haven't done much with OLPC since late last summer. My youngest started school full-time last fall and I've been back in the work force doing contract learning strategy/learning design for corporate clients (always looking for leads if you have any...) and it's left little time for my XO tinkering.

I did load the updated OS on one of the machines. I still have a sticky key problem on the other of our two machines and I haven't had the time to spend trying to figure out how to fix that (I am sure people in our area could help, I haven't pursued any kind of fix after the initial discussions when the G1G1 program was first launched and many of us had sticky key issues.) The updated OS looks a lot better for users, the kids were excited about it. With the school year starting, I may have to set up one of the XO machines as the kids online research station, as they're always trying to use my mac (which is strictly off-limits to children!!)

Liam is now a third grader and very excited about his new classroom. My youngest is in kindergarten and full of stories about her day - she's a use case for the video camera feature of the XO if I ever saw one! :D