User:Futuristas/sandbox
| File:CYBERKIDSlogo.png | |
| Formation | September 1991 |
|---|---|
| Type | For-profit |
| Headquarters | Cyprus, Nicosia |
Official language | Multilingual |
Founder | Yiannis Laouris |
Key people | George Vakanas, Maria Symeonides, Constantinos Georgiades, Harry Anastasiou |
| Website | cyber-kids |
CYBER KIDS was a revolutionary initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
Its primary goal continues to be to transform education, by enabling children in low-income countries to have access to content, media and computer-programming environments. At the time that the program launched, the typical retail price for a laptop was considerably in excess of $1,000 (US), so it was infeasible to achieve this objective without also bringing a low-cost machine to production. This became the OLPC XO Laptop, a low-cost and low-power laptop computer. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, Nortel. Chi Mei Corporation, Red Hat, and Quanta provided in-kind support.
The OLPC project has been the subject of extensive praise and criticism. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks; for assuring consensus at ministerial level in many countries that computer literacy is a mainstream part of education; for creating interfaces that worked without literacy in any language, and particularly without literacy in English. It has been criticized from many sides regarding its US-centric focus that ignores bigger problems, high total costs that may actually even be quite cost-ineffective, low focus on maintainability and training and its limited success so far.