OLPC XO field test - sort of
Monday, December 31, 2007 at 08:21AM 
My XO sat charged and available in the family room all last week while grandsons Paul (age 6) and Miles (age 2) were visiting with their mom and dad.
To my disappointment, the reception to the XO was underwhelming. Paul lost patience after five minutes. Miles whacked at it for a while, mostly in imitation of his older brother who quickly reverted to using the desktop PC. Even their tech-savvy dad spent very little time with the device, having minimal familiarity with Linux.
To be fair, these rather privileged boys had other distractions - new Legos, Thomas the Tank Engine toys, videos, books, cookies, and even a sledding hill just out the back door. Not to mention two doting grandparents willing to play with them.
Some observations:
- A favorite website of these boys is Dave Pilkey's game pages. While we were able to connect to the page and even run Flash to see the game, none of the keyboard controls allowed game play. And, "Oh, man!" what a loooong wait for loads.
- At age 6, Paul has already become a some-what sophisticated Windows user. While he has no problem with the Mac operating system, Sugar threw him. Since Negroponte's theory is that kids will be able to teach themselves this OS, I gave Paul minimal instruction. He was unable or unwilling to invest the time it took to figure all but the minimum out about the XO.
- The XO was great at deflecting gooey fingers, snotty noses, and other liquidy sorts of attacks common with small boys in the winter.
While my family is a very small petrie dish, I'd be willing to bet that if it were released in the US, the XO would be a computer of last resort - used only by those who could or would not spend slightly more on a faster machine with a more familiar acting OS. (The ASUS Eee, for example.) And I understand that Paul and Miles are not the intended audience for this computer. Still, I was a little disappointed that it was not better received. And neither boy (nor parents) lobbied for ownership of the XO.
However I still believe that anyone would rather have an XO than no computer at all.
For what it's worth.
Reader Comments (2)
My parents gave our four year old an OLPC for Christmas. My brother-in-law and my father had both played around with it (they are both programmers) before she got it. She absolutely loves it. She is willing to play around and explore it much more than I would have expected her to and has figured out how to do numerous things on it. I have been amazed at her patience with it and the joy she finds in it. I think there are times when she'll still use one of our laptops to do things, but most of the time she wants to use her laptop now.
Hi Jenny,
I am genuinely delighted to hear this. I will admit my grandsons are somewhat spoiled/jaded when it comes to computer use.
The argument also might be made that girls have more perseverance!
Write back to let me know how it goes after a few weeks of use.
All the best and happy new year,
Doug