One Laptop Per Child, 20 Years Later: A Project with a Purpose and a Legacy

Abstract

THE ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD (OLPC) PROGRAM HAD A SIMPLE PREMISE: IF EVERY child in the world had access to a free or low-cost laptop, vast learning opportunities would be within any child's reach. This access to technology and information would help narrow the educational gap between children with limited resources and those with ample means.

The idea for OLPC came from discussions between computer scientist and educator Seymour Papert and architect Nicholas Negroponte at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Media Lab in the early 2000s,¹ where the two were professors. Papert likened computers locked in the laboratories of higher learning institutions to books chained to the shelves of medieval libraries: Only those with privileged access were able to benefit from the knowledge hidden within. Negroponte compared the sharing of a computer with the sharing of a pencil. What if two people needed to write something—or learn something—at the same time?

Negroponte's belief was that the main barrier to providing advanced educational technology to the masses was the cost. In 2004, laptops and small desktop computers sold for more than US$1,500 each (approximately $2,500 in 2024 dollars). At the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Negroponte urged the technology industry to solve the problem by creating a $100 laptop. He even demonstrated an early prototype of what such a laptop could look like.² A low-cost computer could enable millions of the devices to be sent worldwide, bringing knowledge to every corner of the world. Thus, the OLPC program and the non-profit organization of the same name were born.

Early in the program, it was clear to Negroponte that the key to reducing the laptop's cost was to reduce the display's cost, as it was the costliest component. When Negroponte returned to MIT from Switzerland in 2005, he met Mary Lou Jepsen, the display pioneer and SID Fellow. Their discussions turned to the display innovations required to enable a low-cost laptop that also would be extremely power efficient. Jepsen then signed on as one of the principals of the project and led the core development team.

SID member Scott Soong, who hails from the family-owned tech giant CHIMEI, learned about the project through the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a research and development organization in Taiwan. Soong had studied global development at the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and had a keen interest on the effects of poverty on personal and economic development. When he learned about the project, he grabbed a 7-inch picture frame display, made by CHIMEI's subsidiary Chi Lin, hopped on a plane to Boston, and met with the OLPC team. “Ya gotta let me be a part of this!” said Soong. The team agreed. He then went back to the folks at CHIMEI and convinced them to be a part of the project.

Initial thoughts were that maybe a black and white e-ink type display might be the best choice because of its power efficiency, but this approach would not have been viable because the response time was too slow even for a graphical user interface (GUI). In addition, the project principals wanted to bring color and video into the lives of the kids using the devices, not just for aesthetic purposes but to enhance learning. Jepsen developed the architecture for an innovative LC transflective display. It functions as a color display in transmissive mode in low lighting but reverts to a monochrome display in reflective mode in direct sunlight. This design could provide high-power efficiency and readability in direct sunlight while also displaying a nice color screen inside the classroom or homes of the children who used them.*

“I designed the laptop from the screen backwards. This enabled new innovations around cost, power management, and durability. I also put in a sunlight-readable screen with an innovative color/monochrome architecture that gave retina resolution in the reading mode that surpassed the resolution of Apple screens at the time,” said Jepsen.

CHIMEI Optoelectronics and Chi Lin engineers collaborated with Jepsen and the OLPC design team to manufacture and deliver millions of these transflective displays. CHIMEI also provided the plastic formulation for the case in which the laptop was housed.

Many prominent technology companies pledged economic support for the program early on, including AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, and Nortel Networks. CHIMEI Optoelectronics and Chi Lin built the screen while HiMax produced the IC display drivers, reaching previously unseen power efficiency standards. Quanta Computer used these components (and others) to build the finished product in 2007 (Fig. 1).

However, the hardware was only part of the challenge, so the team worked to create a lightweight operating system (open-source Linux-based), a simplified GUI, and self-contained software bundles that were both powerful and easy to use.⁴ Each laptop had to have access to a large repository of data stored locally, as many areas around the globe had no internet access (broadband or otherwise) in the mid-2000s. The laptop's design used a mesh network so that a single computer with internet access could share that access with other OLPC devices in its proximity.⁵ To save cost, power, and weight, the local magnetic or optical hard drive was eliminated, instead relying on the onboard RAM and flash memory cards for data and software storage.

The program made significant progress in its first two years. Although they never quite reached the $100 price goal, Quanta Computer manufactured the “XO” at a respectable cost of $188, which went into production in 2007.⁶ Each XO laptop included the transflective screen, an integrated video camera, a microphone, long-range Wi-Fi antennas, mesh networking, and a hybrid stylus and touchpad. The XO's 7.5-inch diagonal transflective LCD screen operated in two complementary modes. In reflective mode with the backlight off, the display provided a monochrome image with very high resolution—1,200 × 900 pixels at 200 dpi. In transmissive backlit mode, the display produced full RGB color, but instead of using traditional color filters over the LCD cells, the backlight employed a diffraction grating with lenses that split the light into separate elements of R-G-B and directed those colors into the liquid crystal cells. This eliminated a significant cause of light absorption in traditional RGB LCDs. Both modes could interact so as the ambient light increased, the user would see a combination of monochrome and color content in a complementary fashion. This innovation allowed for significantly lower total backlight energy needed for indoor viewing than other LCD designs of the time. Under high ambient conditions, the viewer would see a high-resolution monochrome image, and the backlight could be shut off to save power. Along with the XO's compact folding design, this allowed for its use as an e-reader device when the laptop was closed.

Along with a standard plug-in power supply, solar and mechanical (hand crank) power source options were demonstrated in early prototypes, allowing off-grid operation. However, after a less-than-impressive initial demonstration of the hand crank at the prototype's unveiling (by former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan), the hand crank option was removed before the unit went into production.⁷

By the end of 2007, OLPC had sold and distributed more than 600,000 XO laptops,⁸ mostly in Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico. Additional units were sold and distributed in Brazil, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Nigeria. The XO even saw a few thousand units sold in Alabama and Pennsylvania in the United States for distribution to low-income households. Over the next few years, several million of the OLPC devices were manufactured and distributed worldwide in various incarnations; all featured the innovative transflective display (Fig. 2).

Although many aspects of the initiative were successful, the OLPC program never quite hit the lofty goals of its founders. Without clear research studies to show the advantages of laptop access for school-age children, as well as extremely tight budgets in the targeted countries, the program did not reach the hundreds of millions of recipients as originally envisioned. In countries such as Peru, which had a fairly high distribution of the XO laptops, follow-up studies showed only minor improvements in math learning and no clearly identifiable improvements in English or other language learning among laptop recipients.

Many reasons were attributed to the program's somewhat limited success. Cultural issues sometimes stifled parental support as young students discovered Western thought and societal concepts, which conflicted with their communities’ traditional cultural practices and religious beliefs. Also, failure came from more mundane reasons. As many laptop owners can attest, computers break down or develop technical issues, both software- and hardware-related, over time. When you build a laptop at the lowest possible cost, such failures are more likely. Without adequate product support and technical assistance, many of these XO laptops never were deployed in schools or children's homes or had to be taken out of service prematurely, as they developed operational issues without local IT experts to address them. However, Jepsen told us that in some regions, children took the initiative to fix common issues themselves, even creating local repair stations within their communities, thereby extending the usable life of the devices.

Some years later, Soong visited one of the communities in Brazil that had purchased OLPC laptops for their students. Here he saw a teacher instructing the students on human viruses, which led to students searching the web and discovering the concept of computer viruses. This led them down an unintended but still educational path. What made the biggest impression on Soong was the obvious pride of ownership that these kids had for their laptops. They treated them carefully and decorated them with stickers to express their individuality (Fig. 3).

“I think that was something that we got right. Giving kids this pride of ownership. It was theirs. And this gave them the excitement to learn using this tool that they otherwise would have had no hope of owning or even using.”

But the idea that the great “digital divide” could be breached simply by delivering a one-size-fits-all hardware and software package may have been a bit optimistic. Perhaps it would have aided the program's success if more targeted groundwork had been provided to local governments at the project's outset on the value added and how it could be adapted for their specific social and cultural needs. But even if it never quite met its ambitious goals, the OLPC organization and program had positive impacts both in the communities it served and in the industry as a whole.

On the technical side, the XO laptop developed by OLPC and MIT offered significant innovations in many areas, including power supply design and power efficiency, display design, mesh networking abilities, keyboard, and touchpad design to provide a durable interactive laptop well suited for rugged environments. The unit's dual-mode screen—monochrome for outside, color for indoor use—offered versatility that had never been seen before in a low-budget computer. The intentional omission of all motor-driven moving parts led to the XO's high-power efficiency.

The technology underwent some updates through the years, including the XO-1.5, which had even fewer physical parts than the original model, the XO-3 tablet, and the XO-4 featuring new components and an optional touchscreen.

These innovations pushed more established brands to offer low-cost PCs to government and educational markets on the heels of XO's introduction. In 2007, Asus offered the first generation of its Eee laptop (a netbook) for $399, and in 2008, Intel offered the “Classmate” laptop for less than $250. In some cases, countries that initially committed to ordering the XO canceled their orders and opted for name-brand laptops instead to potentially get better performance and support for standard operating systems such as Windows.

In late 2024, Chromebook laptops from well-known PC-makers could be purchased at national discount retail chains for less than $100. Would this under-$100 laptop milestone have been reached today without the efforts of the OLPC program? We may never know.

When asked about the legacy of the OLPC project, Soong credits the birth of the educational PC market directly to the OLPC project. “Because there was this OLPC for that price point, all of a sudden, the educational PC market came about. Before that, these laptops were much more expensive, but now we have purpose-built computers and an ecosystem around it.”

From a display innovation perspective, although transflective displays have not seen much widespread commercialization, the quest for ever-increasing power efficiency has led to e-ink screens that can be used in the retail or outdoor environment for extended periods with no external power source. Soong's company, Agile Display Solutions, makes a 32-inch display that can last for two years on a single battery with no external battery source.

Looking back on the OLPC project, Soong said, “It was really important to me, personally, because we work to take care of our family, but we also work to hopefully give back to the community. And few of us have the opportunity to do this so early on in our careers. Also, the connections and contacts that I made in the OLPC project have helped me to develop innovative display products like e-paper/e-ink that are so efficient and inexpensive that they can be used to display product information and pricing on store shelves. Walmart is one of our customers, and they are in the process of rolling this out.”

“My current company, Pervasive Displays (a part of VusionGroup), is now making 1 to 1.5 million of these displays per week. With these network-enabled e-paper labels, companies can save on both materials and labor as price changes can be rolled out store-wide with the flip of a switch. And this can also save a lot of trees with the reduced use of paper in retail. It was the OLPC project that took me down this path.”

In consideration of the OLPC project's innovation and legacy, Jepsen said, “The OLPC architecture hasn't been matched or exceeded in the last 20 years. It's still the lowest power-consumption laptop and lowest-cost laptop. An innovative architecture enabled this. It was the first mesh-networked laptop, the first laptop designed for children who can't yet read, open source, rugged and droppable, and fixable by children who created repair stations in each country. It generated billions of dollars of revenue and kicked off the fastest-growing consumer electronics category ever recorded: the netbook.

“The OLPC changed the equation of what a minister of education could do for the children of their country, what could be done for education in a pandemic, and indeed as Sundar Pichai said, its legacy is the Chromebook from Google. It was the great privilege of my life to co-found this organization with Nicholas Negroponte and lead its technology and architecture,” said Jepsen.

“Two decades later, the machines are so durable and practical that many are actually still in use. And our design meant we delivered the first machines supporting many ‘minor’ languages, like Ethiopia's Amharic. Kids growing up using their own native tongues on computers? What a concept!”

While the original OLPC charitable organization disbanded in 2014, a nonprofit organization carries on its name and mission, touting that the program has led to the worldwide distribution of more than 3 million laptops and devices. According to their site, their ultimate goal “is to enable learning opportunities so children can transform their environments, societies, and realities.” You can read more about it at https://laptop.org.