Collaborative Discovery

The OLPC XO is designed around collaboration and discovery.

Collaboration

A few of the activities on the XO are collaborative, and it is hoped that many more will become collaborative. Users can play music together, take measurements together, write documents together, browse the Web together, and so on. The Sugar user interface emphasizes opportunities for collaboration everywhere. Within activities, users can invite others to join in, sending offers to individuals or to anybody on the local system. The wireless environment display shows active sharing and collaboration by grouping user icons around activity icons.

Collaboration is an important type of human activity. We work together in families, groups of friends, school, work, social organizations, political parties, and so on.

Discovery

The newborn child is built for the task of discovering the world. Discovering Mommy; discovering its toes and such; discovering crawling, walking, running, jumping, skipping, and so on; discovering language, including singing; discovering foods; discovering plants, animals, and inanimate objects; discovering other people; discovering, in short, everything that comes in range of any of the senses, and then discovering ideas that don't exist in the sensory world.

None of this is formal education.

It is desirable to encourage discovery of reading, writing, math, programming, scientific measurement and analysis, and much more. Alan Kay has written about children discovering concepts of calculus and other supposedly advanced ideas.