OLPC Publications

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Hardware Manuals

In progress.

Inside the OLPC XO: Hardware

In the manner of the original Peter Norton book on the IBM PC

Software Manuals

In progress.

Inside the OLPC XO: Software

(Also in Norton manner)

Testing Guide

• how to write test plans
• who tests, how to help test
• how to read the results of automated / human tests

Programming for Children: The OLPC XO Software Developers Guide

• Sugar
• Sugarizing other software

Programming with Children: Tutorials and Explorations

• Etoys Smalltalk
• Python
• Turtle Graphics
• Forth
• Executable Math

Education

In progress.

Teacher Training

For each topic

• What is to be taught?
• How?
• How do we integrate content with computing?

• We have to start with existing paper textbooks.
• We have to proceed by creating electronic versions of these existing textbooks.
• Then we have to think.
• Textbooks were designed before the age of printing. Lectures were created so that students could write out their own copies of the textbook. The divisions of subjects that we use today come from the accidents of their creation, not from what we know about what children are capable of absorbing at a particular age.
• How do we make effective use of the power of computing in creating new textbooks?
• Most school systems in the world today were created by imperial powers for their colonies. They were designed to produce a compliant bureaucracy and military to keep the population in order while their territories were pillaged. Such systems are not suitable to free peoples. What is? Where can we have this discussion with parents, children, teachers, and the rest of society?

How to Learn

• If you teach children to fish, and to make high-tech fishing gear, they will catch all the fish and destroy the fishery.
• If you show children how to find out how the world works, they will maintain it.

Math

The mathematical know-how taught in schools, including arithmetic, plane geometry, and solving equations, is necessary, but is a small part of mathematics. Mathematics as practiced by mathematicians is a process of open-ended discovery and rigorous verification of patterns, where there is never only one right answer. Understanding is the goal, but wonder is the heart of the enterprise. "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare."--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Mathematics has an ethical imperative: proof overrides our preferences.

In mathematics whatever is once proved stays proved, until it is shown to be a special case of a much more general version of mathematics. The most notable such cases are the extensions of numbers to the negative and complex realms; the transition from Euclidean to much more general geometry; and from Peano's proof that there is only one structure fulfilling the axioms of the natural numbers to the non-standard arithmetics of Abraham Robinson and John Horton Conway. Some of the extensions of the numbers are within the realm of elementary-school math. Complex numbers and non-Euclidean geometry can be introduced in high school. Non-standard arithmetics have been moving from the graduate to the undergraduate curriculum over several decades, and will continue to work their way downward, since they make it much easier to teach calculus.

• Kindergarten Calculus
• Executable Math
• Mathematics as Discovery

Science

Science is not about knowing how to get the "right" answers to problems. It is about the process of discovery of the most wondrous part of the wonders of nature: how they work. It is at its best when experiments get the wrong answers according to current theory: the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, the photoelectric effect, the Michelson-Morley experiments, the perihelion of Mercury. That is when new branches of science are created. In the cases cited, these are Quantum Mechanics (both emission and absorption of photons), Special Relativity, and General Relativity. Einstein contributed greatly to the advance of Quantum Mechanics because he couldn't believe it. He came up with a multitude of experiments designed to refute Quantum Mechanics, and each one confirmed it instead. Einstein had a lot of trouble in school, in part because he understood more than his teachers.

Science has ethical imperatives: Evidence in favor of effective theories overrides our preferences. Evidence against current theory requires us to revise current theory or find a better one. Speak up when government or society misuses knowledge or tries to suppresse the truth.

• Discovering the World
• Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics
• Executable Science
• Data Acquisition and Analysis for Children

Art

A biological imperative.

Music

A biological imperative.

Health

Health is an ethical imperative in itself.

• The Biology of Health
• Diseases of the Developing Countries: Their Origins, Preventment, and Treatment
• My Mommy is Dying, My Brother is Dying
• Clean Water Systems using Local Materials

History

True history, not the self-aggrandizement of nations.

New histories of every country that gets the laptops, researched and written by the children.

Geography

Isn't it funny how the Global Village includes everybody but the villagers?

Languages

• The correct English word for a person who speaks several languages is "polyglot".
• The correct English word for a person who speaks only one language is "American".

Languages are an imperative.

• Have children research and write Wikipedia articles in their own languages.
• Have children translate Wikipedia articles from and to their native languages.

Civics

Getting involved is an imperative.

• "Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."--Thomas Jefferson
• "Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum." (Let Justice be done, though the Heavens fall.)--Roman legal maxim

Economics

Free Trade is an imperative. Free for corporations and not for people doesn't count.

• Kindergarten Economics
  • Lemonade Stand game

Business

It is traditional for high school students to have after-school jobs. What should we do for countries that have no burgers to flip, nor anything else? How about teaching students around the world to go into business together? What do they need to know? Whom do they need to make contact with? How do they get financed?

Jobs are an imperative. If governments don't do it, the kids will have to themselves.

Phys Ed

On a computer??! Well, that's one of the ways Olympic athletes do it these days.

Religion

Everybody should know what other religions say, and what their adherents do.

The essential texts of the world religions are available online in the original languages and numerous translations.

References

Mathematics

• Mathematics and the Imagination, by Edward Kasner and James Newman (origin of the word "googol")
• One, Two, Three...Infinity, by George Gamow
• Flatland, by Edwin Abbott
• The Planiverse, by A. K. Dudeney
• Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John Horton Conway, and Richard K. Guy
• Non-standard Analysis by Abraham Robinson
• Non-Euclidean Geometry by H. S. M. Coxeter

Religion

• Christian Bible (many sites, many versions)
• Jewish Tanakh (Torah, Prophets, Writings)
• Muslim Qur'an and Hadith
• Baha'i writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
• Hindu Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, etc.
• Buddhist Tipitaka (Pali), Tripitakas in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese
• Jain writings
• Sikh Sri Guru Granth Sahib
• Confucian Analects, Mencius, etc.
• Daoist Dao De Jing, Juangzi

There are supposed to be a lot of religious imperatives, but there is not much agreement on them. It may be that religious questions are more useful. For example, are we all one people in the sight of (insert preferred deity, if any)? Or do we divide into Us (real people) and Them (beasts? subhuman monsters? infidels? what?).