A lot of ink has been spilled in the pages of The Chronicle and elsewhere about Nicholas Negroponte's ambitious One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to persuade developing nations to buy low-cost machines in bulk for their schoolchildren. But amid the progress reports and will-it-work-or-won't-it debates, there hasn't been much discussion of what participants in Brazil and Libya will see next year when they turn on their laptops.
So this useful article from the Associated Press, which takes Mr. Negroponte's most recent prototype for a test drive, is well worth reading:
Students who turn on the small green-and-white computers will be greeted by a basic home screen with a stick-figure icon at the center, surrounded by a white ring. The entire desktop has a black frame with more icons.
This runic setup signifies the student at the middle. The ring contains programs the student is running, which can be launched by clicking the appropriate icon in the black frame.
When the student opts to view the entire "neighborhood" — the [laptop's] preferred term instead of "desktop" — other stick figures in different colors might appear on the screen. Those indicate schoolmates who are nearby, as detected by the computers' built-in wireless networking capability.
According to Mr. Negroponte, the laptop's interface deliberately avoids the functionalist aesthetic of much computer software. "Children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office-automation tools," he told the AP. –Brock Read
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