The initial order will be between 6 and 10 million. There are about 50 million laptops manufactured each year. There are between 80 and 100 million phones manufactured per year. The $100 laptop uses a mesh network and is similar to a cell phone with a big keyboard and screen. There’s a crank to generate power.

The real win is that the $100 laptop is a factor of 20 cheaper than the books that children need. Content is the key. “The music isn’t a piano.” From an educational standpoint, this project could be a colossal flop if the content isn’t right. What’s the right interface for children in an environment where the adults can’t help much. Can you connect children to pen-pal like mentors over the Internet? The logistics are monumentally hard.

When ever a medium comes in, it takes on the attributes of the old medium that it’s replacing. Guttenberg created fonts that matches the ligatures that medieval script’s used. The still illuminated them by hand and made them big. Just like the handwritten books. 150 years later, Newton published Principia, a use of the new medium which out it to a completely new use: convincing others of your ideas.

Introducing rabbits into Australia doesn’t give you rabbits and Australia. Rabbits changed the Australian landscape. When you add a new way of talking about ideas, you’re adding them to an existing ecology. You change what “normal” is. The $100 laptop has the potential to chance cultures in significant ways. The impact will be different in China than it is in Brazil.

Alan references a paper call “What the Frog’s Eyes Tell the Frog’s Brain.” it turns out that the frog makes the decision of what is food and what is not in it’s retina. You can’t train frogs to eat food they’re not genetically programmed to eat. We’re not like flys…or are we?

Next he references the work of Tom Bower (1966) on babies. Humans are not hard wired for most things, but learn what’s important. Still, anthropologists have identified about 300 universal traits of cultures. There are also interesting things that are not universal. Reading and writing, equal rights, abstract math, perspective drawing, theory of harmony, agriculture, legal systems, science are some examples. These are powerful ideas that are rare. Formal education isn’t needed to teach the universals. Formal education is needed to teach the non-universals.

You can perform logical operations on maps that are real as well as maps that are not real (if X is north of Y and Y is north of Z, then X is north of Z). Science is about taking logical models and applying them to the real world. When we got to space, there were no surprises about what the earth looked like. We had models that were that good. That’s what science does—put together models.

Alan shows how you can teach complex math with cut out shapes. He segues into showing how children can uses Squeak to learn math. He remarks that most educators can’t see how this is math because they’re not mathematicians.

The important question surrounding the $100 laptop is “will it be more than a mere technological artifact?” The answer depends on whether the content, and especially the mentoring, can be brought along with it to have real impact.