Source: Hueiyen News Service
Imphal, July 17 2010:
Authority of the state government has ordered 75,000 laptops under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme for wide coverage of schools by the mission aims at creating educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.
The state which is the second among the states of the country had procured 1000 laptops of the design recently with the introduction of the OLPC.
With the order for procuring 75,000 more laptops, the state become one of the states ordering highest number of the laptops of the kinds.
In the country, the OLPC project was introduced in 2007, when students of Khairat village near Karjat of Kerala received OLPC-designed XO laptops.
A total of 1000 laptops had been procured by the state government and started distribution to four schools�two each from Imphal East and West districts recently.
The XO laptop is an inexpensive subnotebook computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves" (constructionist learning).
It is developed by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization and manufactured by Quanta Computer.
The subnotebooks are designed for sale to government-education systems which then give each primary school child their own laptop.
These rugged, low-power computers use flash memory instead of a hard drive, and come with a distribution of Linux derived from Red Hat's Fedora as their pre-installed operating system, which comes stored in both a copy on the flash memory and in the on-board ROM backup.
The XO laptop to be procured by the state education department is the one specially designed to suit the children of the country.
These laptops draw just one watt of power, have screens that are fully visible in direct sunlight, are deemed virtually 'unbreakable' and are waterproof to ensure longevity.
After the Manipur government procured 1000 laptops, 200 which had already arrived in Imphal had been distributed to four schools as state education department has decided to introduce the scheme on experimental basis from this year.
An official source said that government has ordered 75,000 laptops for introduction of the scheme is other schools across the state.