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Lesley Stahl Reports On The Dream And The Difficulties Of Getting A Computer To Every Child
(CBS) Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT, had a dream. In it every child on the planet had his own computer. In that way, he figured, children from the most impoverished places – from deserts and jungles and slums could become educated and part of the modern world. Poor kids would have new possibilities. As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it was a big dream. Negroponte thought he had a chance of actually seeing it happen if he could help invent a really inexpensive laptop. So, two years ago he founded a non-profit organization called “One Laptop Per Child.” He recruited a cadre of geeks and viola! The hundred dollar laptop, designed specifically for poor children, was born. But let’s go back to the beginning when Negroponte first got his idea in Cambodia. The idea came to him in a remote village called Reaksmy – a 4-hour drive on a dirt Road from the nearest town. It’s as far from MIT as you can get. They don’t even have running water. Negroponte and his family founded a school here in 1999, putting in a satellite dish and generators. Then they gave the children laptops. Instantly, school became a lot more popular. Kids who had never seen a computer before were now crossing the digital divide. Nicholas Negroponte was knocked out. "The first English word of every child in that village was 'Google'," he says. "The village has no electricity, no telephone, no television. And the children take laptops home that are connected broadband to the Internet." When they take the laptops home, the kids often teach the whole family how to use it. Negroponte says the families loved the computers because, in a village with no electricity, it was the brightest light source in the house. "Talk about a metaphor and a reality simultaneously," he says. "It just illuminated that household." Once the computers were there, school attendance went way up. Negroponte says that in Cambodia this year 50 percent more children showed up for the first grade because the kids who were in first grade last year told the other kids, “school is pretty cool.” Negroponte wanted this for all children, everywhere, but he realized conventional computers were too expensive. And so his dream of a hundred-dollar laptop was born. (CBS) And this is it! A low-budget computer for children like second graders in a poor school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Each child has been given his or her own machine – as part of a test for the Brazilian government to see if they should buy them for all their school children. "It’s very exciting," Negroponte says. "It’s very gratifying. It’s been two years in the making." The children seemed to especially like the built-in camera that takes stills and video. It also has Wi-Fi. Negroponte’s idea was that kids don’t need teachers to learn the how to use the computer. They can pick it up by experimenting on their own – with help from a friend. "That is what we are doing… is that that kid is showing this kid – that is key," he says. "They get it instantly. It takes a 10-year-old child about three minutes." When Stahl asks if he means children who have never used any computer before, Negroponte responds, "Children who’ve never, in some cases, seen electricity." One Laptops are for sale in minimum lots of 250,000. Each costs $176, though Negroponte expects the price will go down to $100 within two years. "You go into countries where there may not be enough food, where the children may not have good enough education to even teach them to read, why a laptop?" Stahl asks. "It almost sounds like a luxury for these people who need so much more than that." "Let me take two countries, Pakistan and Nigeria. Fifty per cent of the children in both of those countries are not in school," Negroponte says. "At all. They have no schools, they don’t even have trees under which a teacher might stand…"
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