What You’re Missing Out On with Your Asus EEE or Why You Should Have Bought an OLPC XO
Around Christmas time I got into the G1G1 project that OLPC did and picked up an XO “for my daughter”. We did the whole Christmas thing with it and it took her all of about twenty minutes to rip the “k” key off. I packed the XO up for a little bit and thought to myself “we’ll give that a shot later” and then thought to myself “how my times and different ways can you use quotes in one post”. In fairness the daughter was just barely three at the time and ripping of keys, I’m sure, seemed like a natural thing to do.
About a month ago I got my daughter playing a few games on the PC. Just the ones that you can play online. You know the ones that are for kids. Good wholesome games, for example Defend Your Castle, Trogdor and of course The Impossible Quiz. Seriously we started at Nickjr. The daughter would use the space bar and I’d do the rest. Shortly she was clicking the mouse and about two weeks ago mom taught her to click and drag. From there it was game over.
Me: You want some help playing that game
Her: Nope, I got it
About two days later I walked into the computer room and she was in a chat room fending off predators and looking at porn. I mean as soon as I came it she was all alt-tabing and closing windows. It was really cute.
That never happened. But this did:
I walked into the room and she was playing a game a Nickjr that we hadn’t played together before. It was game that I hadn’t shown her. It was a game that involved selecting the correct puzzle pieces and clicking and dragging them to the correct part of the screen to create a robot that would do something. When I first walked in I just stood back and watched her. The puzzles had about 15 pieces, some large, some small, and she was just clicking and dragging and hitting the right spots and using deduction to find the right spots.
It was pretty amazing. I want to stress again that
- she found this game on her own
- she learned how to play this game on her own
- she’s three
In fact it’s the game that she’s playing in this video:
Now I’ve just spent a lot of time setting this post up and I realize there’s very little chance that anyone’s made it this far. If you have here’s the point I’m trying to make:
I set that game up so she could play it on her own computer. Which she did, for about five minutes. A few minutes later she remembered taking pictures with the XO at Christmas-time before the “k” key debacle and wanted to do that again. So I showed her where that app was, showed her how to click the little circle to start the recording and away she went. Seriously.
She told 15 second stories about her blanket. Took the XO outside and made another one about her soccer ball. Tried to get her brother and cats into the act (both are about as easy to get to do what you want). And screamed and laughed, a lot. She did all of this on her own. She even unplugged and plugged in the mouse as she went from place to place in the house.
A short time later she had opened the paint program and after showing her where the pencil tool and the colors were she went after that too. Again, you know what I’m going to say here, but it was on her own. No prompting, very little showing, just her doing and creating.
She’s already asking about the little turtle, and I can’t wait to learn logo and turtle math again with her. Before long I’m sure she’ll be asking about the other things too and what she can do with this machine. This children’s machine. Her machine.
Here’s where this gets important (and I’m sorry it took me so long to get here): because of the design of the computer and the design of the Linux OS, Sugar, it’s created an environment where my daughter wants to create things, not just sit there and do things that have been created for her. She now wants to create her own things more than play the pre-built games at nickjr.
To the folks that bought an Asus or are going to buy the other alternatives out there, you’re missing the boat and missing the point. PCs have been created with some idea of what we’re supposed to do with these machines. Those machines, just like our PCs, tell us what to do with with them. The XO is built for kids to imagine what to do with it and then make that happen.
That’s the part of the discussion that’s been missing. Until I got a chance to watch a kid use one, I didn’t quite get it. Now it couldn’t be more clear.