Working for my dreams - a Tanzanian OLPC experience

Students at Tumaini University in Tanzania won a prestigious OLPC project where Ukombozi primary school in Tanzania was given 100 XO laptops for the children at the school. After teachers and students had undertaken basic training in using the laptops the workshop “Working for my Dreams” was organized at the school. The XO laptop, specially designed for young learners in developing countries showed a number of short comings including the poor functionality of the mouse, difficulties in installing additional applications and the limited storage space, which raised several questions around the technology and its usefulness. Much time was spent on figuring out solutions on how to use the XO laptops for basic things such as showing recorded videos in the browser which would have been minor tasks on any other commercially available platform. The outcome of the workshop was however a success and XO was eventually able to perform according to our needs for the workshop. We will evaluate the XO platform based on the context of Ukombozi primary school and on the tasks required of the XO laptop for the success of the workshop. The technical challenges encountered during the workshop and our solutions in overcoming the challenges will be discussed.