Massachusetts Plan Would Provide Laptops For All Students

The state of Massachusetts is considering a plan to provide a laptop computer to every middle and senior high school student in the state.

The plan, offered by Governor Mitt Romney, includes other provisions, such as adding 1,000 new science and math teachers. The nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization was credited with the idea of providing the laptops; in 2000, Maine began a program to equip all seventh graders in that state with laptops. The initiative depends in part on acquiring laptops for about $100 each, an idea put forth by Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of MIT’s Media Laboratory.

Negroponte formed the OLPC to help provide such inexpensive computers to children in developing nations. According to Negroponte, pencils are “tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics.” Computers, he says, can be seen the same way, though they are “far more powerful.”

Federal Computer Week, 29 September 2005