“Save the children… from having to use Windows 10.” What if you were a schoolkid in rural Oaxaca (about an hour’s drive from the part the tourists enjoy) without Internet and wanted to learn from Wikipedia, Khan Academy, etc.? Kids on Computers has figured out how to set up labs in schools with a Raspberry Pi driving each child’s monitor. The Raspberry Pi runs a version of Unix, a web browser, a video player, etc.
Do you want to be a hero to some young Mexicans? Instead of spending time expressing righteous anger on Facebook regarding Donald Trump’s existence, you could work long enough to earn $68 pre-tax dollars and then make a tax-deductible purchase of a Raspberry Pi and have it shipped to my house or Avni Khatri’s. Email me (philg@mit.edu) if you need the address. Avni can send you a letter for the IRS. Look on the bright side of spendthrift government: With Bernie’s new tax rates, maybe you’ll get 90 percent of the $68 back!
[You might ask why I’m not buying a huge stack of these myself. It seems that there is a limit to how many a single individual can purchase.]
1. I suppose you have to start somewhere but is internet access in rural Oaxaca really what these kids need most of all? It’s easy to fantasize that there are a bunch of Ramanujans out there in the villages just waiting to learn algebraic geometry from MIT Opencourseware, I’d bet the reality is more like playing video games.
2. In addition to the Raspberry, don’t you still need a monitor, keyboard, mouse, wifi card or lan cable going to a router, etc.? By the time you add these things in (especially the monitor), isn’t the cost about the same as a Chromebook or used Windows laptop?
The computers are not typically on the Internet. They connect to a local server holding an offline cache of Wikipedia, etc.
As you point out the total cost ends up similar to alternatives. Kids on Computers is about the teaching not about the hardware.
Jackie: a Windows laptop won’t work, KOC only installs open source software. As you point out, a Raspberry Pi will require a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but they’re not that expensive when bought in Mexico, and we don’t have to worry about transporting them all the way there.
As Philip said, no Internet access is provided, rather there’s a server for the lab that hosts things like Kahn Academy, Wikipedia, etc.
Regarding playing video games… we do install a fair bit of educational software, and a lot of it is actually games, but you advance levels by solving problems.
I’m one of the volunteers, and I went to Mexico with KOC in 2014 and 2015. It was a great experience, and just watching the reactions of the children and their parents made it all worth it.
One other thing I’d like to mention is the level of involvement the local community has: the parents help get a classroom ready to be converted into a computer lab (and at one of the schools, they actually built a new classroom… that is, the parents volunteered their time and labor).