OLPC Laos

FAQ from Teachers in Lao PDR

• Will this laptop be available in Laos?
• How will the teachers be trained?
• Which age of children is the laptop for? (5-10,10-15,15-graduade)?
• My sallary is 20$ in one month and I have 4 children. How can I pay 100$ per kid?
• Does it also work with 220V Socket without cranking?
• Does the teachers get the PC before the children get one?
• Is this project only for rich countries like Thailand and China?
• Is there a phone hotline where I can get more infos about this project?

Other questions

• Is there a contact to the Lao PDR government?
• Who will translate things to Lao language - there is no big open source community?
• The Lao PDR government does not have much money. To sell wood from primary forests maybe is the only possibility to finance this project. Are there alternatives?
• To build the education infrastruction for OLPC may take a long time - when does this task starts? Isn't that more time critical then the hardware?

Challenge

Laos is a very small country but has it's one language and script. There is not much software translated into lao language till now. Translation from thai to lao shouldn't be difficult, but it has all to be rewritten because of the different script. Most of the people in laos understand spoken thai. More educated people can read thai fluent. For primary and secondary school thai or english is not an option.

Translation should be startet as soon as possible and needs a budget. The wikipedia in lao is also far from useable for education. http://lo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Schedule

Offer

• olpc contacts the Lao PDR government and gives details about the availability

Finance

• Hardwarecost
• Supportcost
• Credit

Government

• Protect cultural identit
• Laws
• Decision

Infrastructur

• Hardware repair
• Software support
• Network, Servers, Power supply
• Train the trainers

Manufactor

• Keyboard Layout
• Contract

Order

• Medial Event

Introduction

• Printed manuals for children, teachers and techicans in Lao language
• Localized introducion (Multimedia)
• Final HD Image

Deliver

• What Age first
• Where first