Paper and Pencils

In the External Developers page is the following comment.

Expect that the kids have no paper, pens, pencils, books or trained teachers. Many OLPCs will be deployed into just such an environment.

This page is started in the hope that a sponsor can be found for paper and pencil packs to be provided to the children.

However, we might want to use the laptops as a disruptive element in the traditional mindset of teaching and learning that glorifies the use of pen and paper. Papert says:

In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast
number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the
parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated
citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is "good math" is not
enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the
total body of good mathematics. The real reason is that it matches the
technology of pencil and paper: It is easy for a student to draw the
curve on squared paper and for a teacher to verify that the assignment
has been done correctly.

I have noted elsewhere (Papert, 1996b), that School's math can be
characterized by the fact that its typical act is making marks on
paper. Explorations in the Space of Mathematics Education develops
this idea by imagining an alternative mathematical education in which
the typical activity begins with and consists of creating, modifying,
or controlling dynamic computational objects. In this context the
parabola may be first encountered by a child creating a videogame
as the trajectory of an animal's leap or a missile's flight; here,
the natural first formalism for the parabola is an expression in a
child-appropriate computational language of something like "the path
followed when horizontal speed and vertical acceleration are both
constant."

Many readers will say that is too abstract for children. This is
because they have in mind children who grew up using the static
medium of pencil and paper as the primary medium for representing
mathematical ideas. Attempts to inject this treatment of the parabola
as an isolated innovation into an otherwise unchanged School will
confirm their negative view. For children who have acquired true
computational fluency by growing up with the dynamic medium as a
primary representation for mathematical thinking, I argue that it
would plausibly be more concrete, more intuitive, and far more
motivating than quadratic equations. My experiments support this
expectation by showing that the dynamic definition is indeed
accessible even to elementary school children who are given the
opportunity to acquire a degree of computational fluency that is still
very limited though considerably more than a few students develop in
what are misleadingly called computer labs in contemporary schools.

http://www.papert.org/articles/school_reform.html