OLPC Brasil/Porto Alegre

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Context

In 2006, the Brazilian Government, inspired by the OLPC view of learning, created an initiative to investigate the use of laptops in education. This initiative was named Um Computador por Aluno - UCA, witch stands for one computer per child, as a way to define a national project, related by independent from OLPC.

Late that year, the government decided to create several pilot schools as a strategy to learn as much as possible before starting a country size scale project. On that time, other companies already contacted the Ministery of Education in order to offer their own laptops, and the government decided to create 5 pilots, two of them using the OLPC XO. The Cognitive Studies Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul State (LEC/UFRGS) was invited by the Brazilian federal government to integrate the UCA (One Computer per Student) Project, implemented with the goal of investigating the use of educational laptops as a learning tool in public schools.

Since then the laboratory has been coordinating one of the trial experiences in Brazil, working in cooperation with Luciana de Abreu Public Elementary School, located in Porto Alegre. The purpose of this partnership is to investigate a new pedagogical models to support the future expansion of the initiative. At the present moment, the government is about to buy 150.000 laptops to establish the modality 1:1 (one laptop per student) in 300 schools geographically distributed all over the country. XO, designed and created especially for children’s activities, is the machine tested by LEC.

Luciana de Abreu Elementary School

Front view of the Luciana de Abreu School

The Luciana de Abreu Elementary School is a public school that was selected by LEC to be one of the Pilot schools of the UCA Project. The school was select because in the time when pilot started (early 2007), there was a restriction in the number of laptops that OLPC could manufacture and donated to the Brazilian Government. Since LEC wanted to achieve saturation inside the school (not test only 1 or two classes, but the whole institution), it was required to select one that had less than 400 hundred students.

With a total of 350 students, the school is located in a urban area with high demographic density. The area where it's inserted is formed by many residential apartment buildings and small shops, being mainly a medium class neighborhood. However, the students of the school are mainly the children from the workers of the area and from a near shantytown - A vila plenatário. It works as an elementary school (from 1th to 8th grade) during the day and at night it has an education program for adults and youth.

• Video with a tour inside the school
• Pictures of the school

A new machine, a new educational methodology

The evaluation of features which allow students to “learn trough doing” comes together with a solid pedagogical analysis, composed by different units of investigation and sustained by thirty years of studies developed by the laboratory concerning the impacts of the introduction of information technology in education. A fundamental issue that goes beyond the mere access to information technology is how to take advantage of the richness of possibilities and environments enabled by digital media to help human and social development. Society is changing from Industrial Era to Information Era. However, the knowledge and values transmitted by ongoing education are still replicating the old industrial paradigm by using massive methods of teaching. In order to overcome these barriers and turn students the real authors of their knowledge, LEC has created the Learning Projects Methodology. Brazilian educational system, based on National Curricular Guidelines, enables flexibility of organization and management. Each school can create its own Political and Pedagogical Plan, integrating communities of teachers, coordinators, parents and students. This context makes the country a fertile field to innovate educational practices. The National Curricular Guidelines are aligned with the perspective of knowledge construction: they define as curricular contents concepts, attitudes and skills, emphasizing aspects such as expression, cooperation and communication. The Learning Projects Methodology not only modifies the school routine, but also changes the paradigm of a secular educational institution. It considers the student the center of the learning process and marks the passage from an instructionist model of education to a pedagogy focused on the students’ real interests. When creating learning projects, on the contrary to what happens in traditional classes, students choose the topics to be studied, based on their own needs and motivations, and the issues are worked in an interdisciplinary way. They share productions and become agents instead of receivers, “learning to learn” and think. Teachers, in turn, replace the role of transmitters of information by the role of students’ advisors and partners, encouraging interaction and the development of different concepts. Several researches conducted at LEC based on this methodology have demonstrated its success and benefits to children. The adoption of XO, together with an appropriate pedagogical and methodological basis, is a powerful initiative to help changing traditional education, bringing along several possibilities to develop intelligence, competences and solidarity.

Related links

• Pictures Gallery
• LEC Webpage about OLPC and UCA (in portuguese)
• YouTube Channel with Videos about the Pilot
• J5 Blog Post about hit visit to the Porto Alegre School
• Inside One Laptop per Child: Episode 04