I'll jump in to again tout CP4E as an "alive and thriving" acronym (or abbreviation) that escapes some of the OLPC spin, and that's a good thing. Diversity matters.
Firstly, we escape "for children" and instead have "for everyone" or "for everybody" which sounds more egalitarian and less into inter-generational warfare, excluding adults, which in developing areas are as unlikely to have laptops as the kids. Secondly, we focus on an activity rather than a shape and/or size of computer, by emphasizing "programming" -- an activity which all these boxes require and support. Ever since OSCON 2005 I think it was, with the Gibson Guitar bus outside, Gibson a sponsor, I've been thinking of portable computers as musical instruments we carry around, like guitars in a lot of ways. Geek = Musician has a kind of pleasing set of connotations. The idea being: if you get into it more than superficially, you get into programming somehow, no ifs ands or buts about it. Now I'm not suggesting we help those anxious to paint laptops in a bad light, because they feel threatened by OLPC. I support OLPC and continue to push it, welcome it. But CP4E is different, both in approach and philosophy, is home grown within Python Nation (by Guido), has ongoing manifestations. So I'm not planning to drop CP4E *in place of* OLPC just as surely. They're not the same. Frankly, I think OLPC will get by without a lot of help from the Python community, in terms of just getting the hardware spread around. It's what goes on with those laptops once "in situ" that Python comes in. What will the students actually *do* with these machines? Will they learn to program them? Or will they be left essentially without direction, left to tackle a tired pre- computer curriculum that was never crafted with DynaBooks in mind (ala the Empire State model, a sorry affair I'm glad is unreflective of my own personal experience). Kirby
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