Peru's ambitious laptop program gets mixed grades

Uruguay, a small, flat country with a far higher standard of living and ubiquitous internet, has honored those requirements

Peru did not.

Becerra said trade-offs were necessary because it would have cost $1.2 billion to provide all 6 million children in Peru’s elementary schools with laptops. Rural schools, beginning with those where a single teacher manages multiple grades, got priority.

But those schools’ very remoteness complicated matters.

Some parents, mistakenly believing themselves the laptops’ owners, tried to sell the machines, Becerra said.

Others, about a quarter, didn’t want the computers coming home, fearing theft, the development bank researchers found. Meanwhile, two in five children didn’t take their computers home because their school wouldn’t let them.

Some schools didn’t have enough electricity to power the machines.

And then there was the internet. Less than 1 percent of the schools studied had it.

Not only were kids deprived of the chance to widen their horizons and meet like-minded students, they were also deprived of access to updated software purged of bugs.

“In lots of places (in Peru) they still have the software versions from 2008,” said Pablo Flores, a steward of Uruguay’s OLPC program.

Patzer blogged about the frustration he witnessed when kids and teachers struggled with the laptops’ buggy software and, not understanding what to do, “promptly boxed them up put them back in the corner.”

The contrast couldn’t be starker in Uruguay, whose program has been touted by Negroponte and others as a model although no major outside study has been done of it.

Programming festivals that Flores helps organize there have led to the development of applications that teach geography and chess, play radio stations and read to the blind.

Those applications are available for use by anyone, anywhere, including Peruvian children.

Sandro Marcone, the education official who took over Peru’s OLPC program last year, has already made modifications to the program, including making the XO laptop part of Peru’s university teacher-training curriculum this year so young educators are fully familiar with it.

Marcone’s office will continue to support the laptops and replace broken ones.

It plans to expand rural internet penetration and put new support resources online. Part of the new strategy is to encourage regional governments to manage their own educational technology and support.

“The ministry is not going to do another macro project of this type. It is not going to make multimillion-dollar purchases and distribute (computers) like candy.”

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