According Daily Tech, the kinderlappy is going to be focusing on teaching kids how to use Office apps rather than how to create new things using an interface called “Sugar”. I don’t think they are really understanding what learning with a laptop can mean. It’s not about creating new “things” whatever those are, it’s about getting kids to start to understand how to use tools and approach problems with the tools that they have (ala Mindtools). The biggest and baddest of these is of course it’s OS that can be modified and supports a massive array of “things”. To me, this is classic gearhead thinking and why you shouldn’t let techs decide what to use in the classroom. In the end it’s about what you do with what you have that is important, something that thankfully the people behind the kinderlappy seem to understand.
Sugar, the OLPC Human Interface. Sugar provides chat and sharing functions for the core applications featured on the OLPC. Christopher Blizzard, a lead developer for the OLPC project, emphasizes “We want this interface to be social. This means that kids can communicate in every app that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating.”
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