A while back, MIT, announced their intentions to provide every child on this planet with the ultimate educational tool, as cheaply as possible ($100). Such a cheap laptop would need to cross many barriers, physical, cultural and otherwise, be child-friendly in every way, and durable to boot.
For the first time, I found out today, that they'd finished their designing and testing, for how long I'm not sure, they started mass production in November. They couldn't get it down to $100, but $188 is still damn good. You can check out the beast at
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/explore.php
My favorite thing about this laptop is that every one of them has a wireless router in it. For the less tech-savvy, this means they not only can connect wirelessly, they give out wireless signals, and thus a whole classroom, miles away from any base station, sitting under an acacia tree, can form their own network!
News have come in, and governments are buying them in bulk, Peru just ordered 260,000 of them, and if you want in on the action, you can actually order a laptop for a child (chosen by the foundation in places like Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda etc.) as a gift:
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/give-a-laptop.php
Just think of the boost in literacy any child would get with one of these in their hands, in a world where even decent paper, let alone a book, may be hard to come by.
