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Numerous media informed that Polish government will be giving away laptops to every kid in the country. The project will cost about 500 mln PLN (250 mln USD) yearly over the next couple of years and first laptops will be handed as early as September 2009.

There is still little information about the details of the project. We know that the first delivery of laptops may happen in September 2009 and that the program will be first deployed as an experiment in a few dozen selected schools. In 2010 the laptops will spread over the whole nation, reaching 1.5 mln kids in secondary schools (children aged 12-14). In the following years, it shall be also deployed in primary/elementary schools (children aged 6-11) nationwide.
Also from what it seems, the project is a serious one. It has been presented by Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland (which is the most influential political role) and it’s one of the key educational projects of the Liberal-Conservative party (Civic Platform) that is currently in power. Tomasz Arabski from the Prime Minister’s office is personally responsible for its success or failure. Hundreds of experts from all around Poland have been also employed to help the dream come true.

So, that’s all we basically know for now (I’m still trying to reach the people responsible for this large project, with limited success). The rest is pure speculation.

In this write-up I’m going to present a few ideas regarding the project and examine how it should be done so that the millions of bucks are not wasted.

In short, the expected problems can be defined by four areas: logistics, hardware, software and the teachers.

Logistics

First, I don’t agree with many people saying that giving away of laptops is a bad idea per se. At least it’s not way worse than giving away the books or any other type of goods. Obviously the problem with give-aways is that some people are capable of respecting only what they personally bought and own. If they receive something for granted, they may believe is “supposed to be this way”. That’s the mentality of lots of people, even the young ones. 50 years of the communists regime is still paying back. Except for that it’s also human nature. It’s hard to do something about it, really.
But there are ways to protect the people from themselves.

Here are a few random ideas:

• By default the parents are obliged to buy the laptops. The machines should not cost more that 200 USD so it is within the reach of a typical Polish family. This eliminates the “it’s not my property so why should I care” factor.
• And for those kids whose parents just cannot accept that kind of an expense, laptops would be given away from some special fund run by the government. Those laptops would be the property of schools, they would have to be handed back for the Summer vacations for maintenance and so on and would return to school when the kid graduates (as long as they’re still alive).
• The market value of those laptops needs to be as low as possible. This will discourage the alcoholic daddies from trading the little computers for 2 bottles of vodka on a local market (and if you think it’s far-fetched that means you have just never been to the Polish province).
• The ideas solution (called Bitfrost) will be to copy the kind of lock used in the XO-1 laptops of the OLPC project that turn the laptops into bricks if they cannot reach the authentication server for a predefined period of time. Sure it’s DRM, sure it can be hacked, but it won’t be easy, thus it should discourage the thieves.

Hardware

The laptop, if you want the children to have it in their backpack every day, cannot be heavy. Actually it has to be very very light. 2 kg (4 pounds) is too heavy. 1kg (2 pounds) would be ideal. This requirement eliminates all laptops with screen size greater than 10”. So, we’re talking about a netbook here, not a proper laptop. Those machines cost around 300-500 USD currently. Assuming a mass order, the price will most likely be as low as 200 USD per machine (that’s approximately how much the OLPC XO-1s cost when ordered by governments).
Obviously the laptop needs to have a WiFi card, so that the Internet can be accessed easily at school (provided that each school has a local WiFi network at the time of deployment, currently I’m guessing that fewer than 5% of Polish schools have such networks). No 3G (too competitive!), no additional redundant features.
The focus should be put on resistance. The laptops need to be rock-solid if they are to serve the kids for more than a month each. And you need to realize what the kids do with their stuff. It’s not uncommon to throw away peer’s backpack from the second floor “just for fun”. Sitting, jumping and throwing them at others is common as well. Summing up: it has to be US-Army-ready, not a cheap plastic toy.

Rumors are spreading that this is the laptop of choice of the Polish govmt.

Software

The software for the laptops seems even more important than the hardware. The whole project makes no sense unless appropriate software is installed on the machines that can be used by the teachers to make the classes more fun and encourage the kids to study.
Obviously I’m to talking here about an office suite and an image-processing tool. Those are just part of the minimal requirements, together with the web browser and an e-mail app.
The software needs to be carefully selected for each of the subjects taught. It’s likely that some — if not most — of it will have to be written from scratch. Some bits may be taken from existing products, after customization and localization. Here, open source software automatically comes into my mind. Using it as the common ground may be a very smart idea. Especially when we’re thinking in years rather than in months about the project. And here are a few other good reasons supporting this view.

The teachers

We all know the logistics is important and the software and hardware needs to be carefully selected. But what really matters here and what the key factor is for the projects’s success are.. the teachers themselves. The teachers and the educational program.

As I understand, the main idea is that the computers help the teachers in passing their message. They are not some miracle solutions to the emptiness of the message. They are being introduced to enhance the message, make it more clear and more fun at the same time, so that the kids don’t stay bored, but quite the opposite — enjoy the classes.

To justify the amount of money being spent on the project, it seems like a reasonable assumption that the laptops should be used with all taught subjects/classes, not just a few that manage to adjust their programs.
Obviously in order to do a bit more than checking out the unknown fish species in Wikipedia, a reorganization of the tuition program is required, so that the computer, or rather the dedicated software application becomes part of the regular schedule.

It can be done. It has been done in many places already, but usually rather locally than on a large scale. When I studied in Oscoda Area High School (Michigan, US), I used some kind of scientific Texas Instrument calculator for my Calculus class. On each class we used the TI thing to model integrals and different mathematical functions. The idea was to use it for the boring stuff, like preparing the random data or doing some computations, while concentrating the efforts on the important and cool stuff, like solving real problems. The calculator was programmable. It was a pretty sophisticated tool, actually. Our teacher (Mrs Cable, cheers!) knew how to operate it and helped us to get the most out of the class. However, this was not even necessary in most cases, since the scripts handed out to us before each lesson where pretty descriptive and guided through the process of setting up the TI to do what was required.
I’m sure that preparing such class was a challenging task and I’m sure a lot of people spent a lot of time to perfect the program so that using the TI was a boost, not a stopper during the classes. The effect was great, though. The Calculus class was fun and I think this was one of the reasons I actually chose to head my career towards computer science in programming after all.

Summary

Anyway, returning to the Polish reality…. It can be clearly pictured that there is a hell lot to be done. Starting from setting up a plan, then doing all the boring work on the scripts for each subject, finally buying the hardware and writing the software and eventually teaching the teachers.

It is also pretty obvious that 500 mln PLN is just a start. It will get us a million new laptops, 500 PLN (250 USD) each. But a lot more has to be spent on experts nationwide and numerous courses for teachers so that they know how to use those new tools and stay effective.

So, if the plan is more that political wishful thinking, I’m assuming the work is already in progress and hopefully soon we’re going to hear more about it in the coming weeks from its coordinators.

Borys Musielak

PS. As soon as I get in touch with someone responsible for the project, I’ll let you know and post an update on this blog.

PS2. No, I have no clue whether the government considers going with the OLPC initiative or buying the laptops from a company like Intel (Classmate PC) or Elonex (Elonex ONE). I guess there will be a public offer for the equipment and it will be a large one so you’re not gonna miss it

PS3. More Polish media coverage on that issue: Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, Onet.pl, Dziennik Internautów, Wprost.pl, FWIOO.pl.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 12:50 and is filed under education, poland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.