Yes, it was a clear success. It not only did they improve the education of several children and gathered valuable information on how we can try it better next time, they also scared an oligopolistic industry into diversifying their products and supplying several needs that were ignored.

That said, OLPC was extremely ambitious. I don't think they achieved any of the project's objectives. They get a lot of criticism because of that, and it's all ridiculously unfair.

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rayiner a day ago | parent [-]

Many people thought that giving kids computers would make the smarter and more generally educated, not just give them better skills with computers.

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marcosdumay a day ago | parent [-]

Many people though that giving kids entire new ways to access knowledge and cooperate on their projects would make them smarter and more generally educated.

And honestly, if you think that's stupid, I'm not really interested on whatever else you think on the subject. It happened to not work for several reasons, some of them mistakes from the OLPC project, but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.

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lurk2 a day ago | parent [-]

> but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.

There’s one failed program indicating that it didn’t work. Are you aware of any successful programs showing that it could?

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jacquesm a day ago | parent [-]

Well, the BBC had a whole program around getting schools into computing and it worked out fabulously well, so yes. It indirectly ended up giving us a novel processor that is used in just about everything as well.

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zozbot234 a day ago | parent [-]

Are there any studies about the long-term educational effectiveness of those programs? They could definitely be effective wrt. teaching kids simple coding in BASIC or LOGO, but what about other kinds of outcomes?

	▲	jacquesm 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They bootstrapped the UK IT industry with this I would think that the outcome was successful beyond measure.