Post for Google Summer of Code

One laptop per child, one summer of code.

We like to say that One Laptop per Child is an education project, not a laptop one. Educators have long recognized that children learn best when they are active, when they pursue their own interests, and when they participate in cultures of knowledge and engagement. Our goal is to provide children around the world with a tool for this kind of exploration and discovery. Our hope is that access to this tool-- that is to say, our laptop-- will result in a dramatic improvement of education on an unprecedented scale.

That being said, for an education project, we sure do spend a lot of time writing code-- everything from battery drivers to email clients, kernel patches to educational games. Do we have you already? Because we'd love to get you involved...

Our list of project ideas for Google Summer of Code is on the OLPCWiki. One idea that we're particularly interested in is building a multilingual encyclopedia viewer that runs efficiently on the laptops, reads standard encyclopedia file formats, and can display entries in multiple languages without redundant content.

Imagine this: a Primary 4 class in Nigeria wants to write a letter to the Ministry of Education to ask that solar panels be installed on the roof of their school. One group is assigned to research the structure of the Ministry of Education in order to determine to whom they should address their letter. Over the mesh network, they find a version of Wikipedia in their local language, open it up with the viewer, find the Ministry of Education page, and learn who to contact. Another group, assigned to research the science behind solar panels, isn't having much luck finding information on solar energy in any of the four local languages that they speak. They click a button and add Yoruba and English to the encyclopedia viewer. Before their eyes, entries in Yoruba about solar panels appear in the viewer, along with information about photovoltaic cells from the Free Dictionary in English.

Do we have you yet?

Learn how you can get involved in the Summer of Code with OLPC here, or by contacting SJ Klein, Director of Content at OLPC.