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Evidence from the One Laptop per Child program in rural Peru
- anonymousiam 10mo agoSad if true. I was a donor, and the program had good intentions.
- Arrowmaster 10mo agoAt least now instead of just theory we have one study of the results and a data point to use in the next attempt at a similar project. The idea is probably still solid and could be attempted again but with a more refined implementation.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoI don't think you'll find a deeper study than this. And not everything was bad, at least one benefit was "significantly improved students’ computer skills" which may help them get employed in the future, the study focused mostly of academia but there is a whole world outside of academia :)
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoOLPC? like, the Negroponte thing from way back? That was dead in water within 5 years or so? (As sad as that was) Just surprised to see a study/report on it this many years later.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoThey got way ambitious with the interface (GUI). I didn’t understand how to do anything with it.
- Lerc 10mo agoThe user interface was an experiment in itself. It was a lot of python which was way too heavy for the machines delivered, it presented a new platform, and thus a barrier to entry to anyone in the field with general computer skills. If it had have been delivered using the same Linux base with any number of off-the-shelf minimal window managers it would performed much faster, and the body of people who knew how to make software for it would have existed many of whom would have been happy to make what they needed. Instead they got a "We've chosen this for you" of something that had not proven its worth. I still think there's scope for educational systems in all parts of the world if they facilitated development of software that does things that the teachers ask for. I'd love to see a grant program that gave schools money ear tagged for development on open source projects. The schools get to pay for things that they decide they would like, but it has the requirement that it has to be open source because if one school wanted it there's a chance another school will too. They can choose to pool resources and produce even better things.
- bombcar 10mo agoI still think a modified Nintendo DS would have done much more for the same price; if they could get them onboard.
- mapmeld 10mo agoWell that's sort of the point, does it have a positive effect for that cohort of kids years later? The OLPC hardware was looking rough several years ago and Uruguay's Plan Ceibal and other projects aren't using their hardware today. For reasons unclear to me, Sugar Labs (their OS / UI) just got nonprofit status last year?
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoA similar NPR report from 2012: One Child, One Laptop ... And Mixed Results In Peru https://www.npr.org/2012/10/13/162719126/one-child-one-laptop-and-mixed-results-in-peru https://www.npr.org/2012/10/13/162719126/one-child-one-lapto...
- diziet 10mo agoAn unfortunate yet unsurprising report to those familiar with the literature on cognitive ability. I too donated to similar programs. I hope better computer skills make some sort of earning impact, though the prevalence of smart phones probably makes a bigger difference.
- texasthistle 10mo ago[flagged]
- mmooss 10mo ago> Cognitive ability is largely biological/genetic and can't be "trained up" so to speak Would you share evidence? How are you defining 'cognitive ability'? The idea that cognitive ability doesn't benefit from education is unbelievable - the opposite of experience and of what I understand.
- literalAardvark 10mo agoEducation helps channel cognitive ability into useful pathways, but you either have something to channel or don't. Though I'd go with innate over genetic: leaves more room for nurture and epigenetics and doesn't make one sound like a white supremacist.
- mmooss 10mo ago> you either have something to channel or don't Again, any evidence? What exactly is 'cognitive ability'? A hallmark of the lack of substantive argument is vague terms that can mean anything the speaker likes, and by not defining the term they prevent any substantive critique - nobody really knows what they're talking about (and usually, not the speaker either). I highly doubt it's all or nothing. While there are likely variations in anything, they can be quite insignificant. For example, everyone, with tiny exceptions, can learn to speak & understand language, and write & read - highly sophisticated cognitive abilities. And they can improve those abilities through education. These baseless generalities don't show much 'cognitive ability'.
- rowanG077 10mo agoI'm not sure why people here call it a failure. The children who got a laptop have reached superior skill in using computers, while it seems like not sacrificing any other capability. That seems like a great result, skilled computer use is a highly valuable skill.
- crooked-v 10mo agoA lot of people seem to have thought the progression would be "1. Give computers; 2. ???; 3. Better at everything".
- jazzyjackson 10mo agoInspired by the computer in the wall in 1999 Sugata Mitra in which yes, just having a computer exist as a local curiosity lead to kids teaching themselves https://waack.org/2010/04/27/put-more-computers-outside-the-classroom/ https://waack.org/2010/04/27/put-more-computers-outside-the-... https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_kids_can_teach_themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_kids_can_teach_themse...
- alephnerd 10mo agoThe tens of millions per year spent on OLPC could have been better applied to programs that have demonstrated tangible positive impact on human capital development in developing countries, such as free meal programs [0], early childhood developmental screening [1], and other evidence-based policies. Heck, most policymakers in LDCs panned the program at the time as well not actually prioritizing the aid that was needed [2] [0] - https://econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Bonds.pdf https://econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Bonds.pdf [1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5859813/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5859813/ [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20170210165101/http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/12/01/laptop/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170210165101/http://edition.cn...
- jazzyjackson 10mo agoBit like the argument that we shouldn't have gone to the moon
- true2octave 10mo agoAI will have similar effect in general population No significant effect except in the minority who have the drive and capabilities to leverage new technology to achieve their goals There is always a bias on the effects of new technology because the early adopters are already highly capable people
- freeopinion 10mo agoAI has very clearly disincentivized learning. I don't think OLPC can be accused of that.
- lurk2 10mo ago> Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression.
- torginus 10mo agoI constantly use ChatGPT to learn new things, both in terms of software engineering and more general knowledge. I've learned a ton of new things from ChatGPT, some which might even be right.
- aserr 10mo agoThere’s a book, The Charisma Machine (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/), that examines outcomes from multiple OLPC initiatives and covers many of the failings.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoSome of the more recent lookbacks with anecdotes and takes: The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29971982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29971982 OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374
- bigthymer 10mo agoA youtube talk about the book for the lazy\busy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCeaQUPaze4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCeaQUPaze4
- NotGMan 10mo ago[flagged]
- dididn284d 10mo agoSecond ‘genetics’ comment — wow, we’re really far down the supremacy hole The key era of tech was when the Jobs and Wozniak built things in their garage, and considered them a bicycle for the mind You don’t need genetics to ride a bike and improve — but you do need that argument to justify the unjustifiable. Dark days
- lucketone 10mo ago> You don’t need genetics to ride a bike Depends on how you define genetics. Starfish cant ride it; There exist genetic conditions that would make it difficult or impossible to ride a bike (first google search: inherited retinal diseases).
- jimmaswell 10mo agoYeah - while it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc, even if we assume for the sake of argument that this is only some tiny fraction of the population, we should still expand access to the resources as much as possible to catch those kids in the net. It's just better for everyone. Arguments about spending the money on food instead miss the point - if OLPC reaches even a few tech-disposed kids out of every thousand, those kids have a much better shot at being force multipliers for their own local communities and country 20 years from now.
- mmooss 10mo ago> it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc It is unreasonable, a lazy argument of supremacists. We don't know how much (could be minimal), how many, what exactly the effects are ('propensity' is quite vague - exactly what is affected, in what ways, and to what degree?), etc. It's also the anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd trying (again) to create intellectual cover for seizing power.
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- bawolff 10mo agoI think the (overly utopian and unrealistic) ideological basis was not that students would neccesarily do better in traditional learning environments, but that they would become better self-learners and be able to teach themselves things that are relavent to their own needs which may differ from the official curriculum. I doubt that happened, but i don't think this study would capture that if it did.
- cbsmith 10mo agoI think the interesting thing is they saw significant improvement in computer skills, but no significant improvement in academic performance. It suggests to me that the academic program, or at least the measures from it, didn't factor in computer skills, which seems a mistake given their relevance.
- hamdingers 10mo agoOLPC may not have helped many rural children directly, but it did inspire an entire class of computers (netbooks/chromebooks) that made computing more accessible for children and adults across the world. For that reason, I think it was a worthwhile pursuit.
- ghaff 10mo agoNetbooks were largely a passing fad as were Chromebooks in large part, though the latter are still around to some degree. However, OLPC went beyond cheap laptops and, however well-intentioned, never really took off as a unique entity.
- sien 10mo agoFrom : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing "In 2020, Chromebooks outsold Apple Macs for the first time by taking market share from laptops running Microsoft Windows. This rise is attributed to the platform's success in the education market.[79][80][81]" Hmm. This is interesting. Searches give you different numbers. But it looks like the number of Chromebooks sold each year is comparable, but probably lower than the number of Macs.
- rr808 10mo ago2020 was a special time where every child in America was given a Chromebook so they could do school from home.
- ghaff 10mo agoThey've become the browser-centric portal for the education market which is the only thing a lot of people need/want. (I probably prefer that to defaulting to tablets/smartphones.) At the same time, as far as I can tell, Chromebooks are pretty much all K-12 focused devices at this point. Which is fine. But I'd potentially buy something higher-end if it were available. But it isn't.
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- dev1ycan 10mo agoWhat did anyone expect? really, many children especially in the Andes suffer from lead intoxication from mining, fruits and vegetables for export are premium quality while the ones for local consumption are bathed in pesticides and other chemicals, kids in the amazon suffer from parasites and other illnesses, tons of regions have malnutrition... etc. Then there's the fact that Peru is massive (compared to Europe) and most of it lacks internet connectivity, only just recently Starlink started giving newer phones SMS capabilities outside of coverage, but that's as far as it'll go and only for modern expensive phones. Those kids are not going to open a laptop and have a good time attempting to learn something (if they can even reach the internet), I myself have ADHD and it took me so long to even search and discover khan academy (let's not even begin with how much worse sites like Khan Academy are when you don't have the primary instructor, giving said lessons), add in low energy/inability to concentrate or want to do academic work with memory issues due to intoxication and or malnutrition and... yeah, good luck with that. There is high amount of talent in Peru, you can tell because there's government programs to give gifted students from public schools free scholarship to private universities and they all end up top of their class, the hardest university to enter into in Peru happens to be a public university too (national university of engineering), it's exam is pretty fucking hard for someone who just graduated high school and even then the vast majority of students who enter come from poor backgrounds.
- martey 10mo agoA lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should discount or ignore this paper because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.). This is a reasonable argument assuming that most people have only read the free abstract, but this isn't the conclusion that the authors come in the actual paper. Instead, they suggest that the program might have been more successful with increased teacher training and internet access in schools. I was able to access the NBER version of the paper, but it looks like working copies are also available in a number of other locations: - https://publications.iadb.org/en/laptops-long-run-evidence-one-laptop-child-program-rural-peru - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5391874 - https://www.ofermalamud.com/research
- bawolff 10mo agoWhile that's undoubtedly true, is that really feasible? Training programs are expensive, and i imagine difficult to conduct across potentially remote areas with underdeveloped infrastructure. Internet access is maybe more doable now with starlink, but how practical was it at the time? I imagine this varries significantly with region, maybe in some cases all that was needed was LTE modem -> wifi, but if actually new infrastructure needed to be set up, that could be very pricey very fast. Like everything its all about trade offs, if olpc did those things would they have budget for other things?
- zozbot234 10mo agoThere are viable alternatives to Internet access, notably offline resources as provided by projects such as Kiwix. I'm not sure to what extent the projects described in OP actively leveraged these efforts with any real effectiveness. If it didn't, those OLPC mini-laptops would've been functionally equivalent to glorified calculators, and the results would be quite unsurprising.
- em-bee 10mo agothe only way to improve education is to train more and better teachers. that's even completely independent of projects like OLPC. asking if training teachers is feasible is simply the wrong question. arguing that it is expensive is the wrong argument. education and teacher training is the only way to achieve progress in this world. and if training is expensive or difficult to achieve then that's a challenge we need to overcome, not an excuse not to do it.
- lathiat 10mo agoI still have one of the early green OLPC laptops kicking around that I got at linux.conf.au 2005, in part because they were (or were thinking of) making use of avahi as part of the mesh stuff. They are quite fun to look at. The project was quite interesting and exciting, and I really miss the era of custom linux desktops, phones, tablets etc being viable projects, it's a shame the project never really directly worked out.
- zozbot234 10mo agoLinux-based phones and tablets are more viable than ever, though. We even have entirely new device classes today, such as e-paper devices that may turn out to be especially useful in an educational context.
- hereme888 10mo agoIf raw cognitive skills didn't improve, but productivity improved due to improved digital skills, then that's a national-level win.