Abstract:
The One Laptop per Child Foundation has the goal of placing a laptop computer in the hands of every child in every developing country. They have developed special hardware and software especially for use by children in developing countries.

In this talk i'll describe a small project in West Papua, Indonesia called "Planting an OLPC seed in West Papua ". Rather than a top-down approach with experts training teachers that train students, we relied much more on peer-to-peer learning and teaching. One week of university staff and students exploring the laptops and presenting to each other was followed by a week where the teachers (only one who had used a computer before) explored the laptops and presented to each other, this time with support and guidance from the university volunteers. Then two weeks of students (9 to 11 years old) exploring the laptops with support and guidance from the university volunteers and teachers. And then new students were introduced to the laptops by the students who had two weeks of experience. This included computer programming using Scratch.