I finally managed to get a child in front of the XO PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. I thought I would share my observations from watching her interact with this interesting tool.

I would like to introduce you to our student. N'Chantis Morrison is 10 years old, comes from a background of socio-economic hardships (by US standards, anyway), and has been held back a year in school. She has limited access to a computer (until recently, her family's computer was messed up). Yet, she really is a bright young lady. She seems to enjoy learning and looked forward to her time with the XO. I chose her specifically because of her situation, as I felt it important to work with a child whose access to computers is limited and/or unsupervised.

When parents or guardians fail to work with their children on the computer at home, we cannot expect the child to be at the same level as those children whose families do take the time to work with them. And, no, letting your child play on the Disney Channel's website is not the same thing as teaching him/her to use a computer. This, in my view, contributes as much as any other problem to the dilemma that so many of our nation's young children face, and is possibly a key factor in N'Chantis' situation. With that general background in mind, here are my observations of her interaction with the OLPC XO.

I worked through many of the XO's activities with N'Chantis, from helping her figure out how to open the laptop to Pippy and Turtle to the Memory activity. I also worked with her in GCompris and the educational web service, Skills Tutor. She needed only basic instruction or guidance in most cases, and even figured out quite a few things on her own.

Opening the XO was not as intuitive as she thought, and a few prodding questions helped her think through how to go about it. I gave her a quick tour of the hardware features, and she powered up her XO. Once in, I asked her to tell me what each activity icon might represent, and she was pretty good at guessing many of them. We did a brief chat session, browsed the web, and used the camera activity. As I expect will be the case with most children, she really enjoyed the camera activity.

In the Write activity, I had her write a few sentences telling me about herself. I then had her create a table and put the names of family members into the cells. With the exception of spelling problems, she performed reasonably well. I noticed in her editing efforts, she frequently erases entire words, instead of only replacing the incorrect characters. So I took a minute to work with her on that point. Still, she will need to work at it, so we'll see how she does in the future.

In TamTamJam, I showed her how to select an instrument and play it, as well as adding in a voice. While I was momentarily distracted, she managed to generate a more complex ensemble of the pre-recorded sounds as a loop. Bravo! We pulled up examples in Pippy and Turtle, and she was able to see the effects of changing the variables on the output of the respective programs. She both performed well at, and enjoyed, the memory activity.

In GCompris, she seemed to enjoy the puzzles, but found the required motor skills to be a bit taxing. I'm not sure why that task was so difficult for her, but I believe it was more about her needing to develop better skills with the touchpad than anything. In her defense, the touchpad is rather small, and children will need to learn to be aware of its limitations. Due to the limits on our time, I was not able to explore some of the other activities with her. I do have one complaint about the GCompris puzzles. Once the child finishes the puzzle, it almost immediately disappears, and there is no chance for them to appreciate some of the world's great paintings that comprise the puzzles.

We finally turned our attention to Skills Tutor, performing two of the activities that web service offers. Skills Tutor does not, unfortunately, work with the default Gnash player included with the XOs. It is unfortunate to give children a wonderful tool that uses Free software, only to require them to install a non-Free Flash player - a process many adults have no desire to undertake. What's more, Skills Tutor does not work perfectly with the non-Free Flash player on the XOs. Crashes required browser restarts twice, and a full reboot once. In any case, Skills Tutor needs to be able to run crash-free on the XOs using Gnash.

The Skills Tutor activities I have seen require little in the way of motor skills or coordination. While that makes for simple movement through the exercises, I think that GCompris goes further to help children develop real computer skills in this regard. After all, the old Click-and-Drag is one of the most-used skills in a graphical desktop environment, and should be second nature to anyone using a computer. That said, N'Chantis only got one answer wrong in the Skills Tutor activities she performed. She did not take the time to think about the pattern in that case, but on review, was able to see the pattern with a little prodding.

GCompris is aimed at younger children. As children grow older, they will need more challenging software tools. I recommend using GCompris for the younger children, and working to develop the Gnash project so that it can work with Skills tutor (or vice-versa), which incorporates the older children. It just doesn't make sense to have to install a second program to do what Gnash already does. Another idea is to develop new activities for older Children in GCompris - or a second Free software program aimed at older students. Ideally, children can be taught the importance of Free software and sharing.

The most important question we must answer is whether children can learn and learn well using the XO laptops. It matters that children can use them to learn the skills necessary to survive as adults. In my view, so far, the XOs running GCompris offer the best opportunity for children to learn a wide range of skills. N'Chantis enjoyed her time with the XO, and will surely relish any future opportunities to use it. For a child to learn is one thing. For her to enjoy learning is far more precious than gold and silver. The XO seems to help children achieve both.