Step 1: give every kid a laptop. Step 2: learning begins?

I worked at one for a few years as a tutor. Annoyingly, the biggest complaint from new parents was "My kid already did this worksheet! Why are you giving it to him again?"

I had to explain that repetition was the most important part. You could explain the science but the parents don't seem to care about that part. The parents often thought that it was de-motivational and belittling to have to do the same work over again, so we often mentioned that revisiting something you've done before and acing it the second time around can actually boost confidence quite a bit (we would sometimes make a point of showing a kid that he might not have done so well with something a few months ago, and now he did it perfectly or nearly perfectly).

PS: 99.9999% of tutoring success depended on motivation. I could teach any kid in the world anything if he was motivated, regardless of his or her knowledge when they came to us. There were only two things I figured out about how to get kids motivated that weren't:

1. Enthusiasm is contagious. The tutor damn well better be excited about the subject. The environment better be positive, and sometimes that meant telling the parents to back off. Most parents I worked with were Indian/Chinese/strict. Most were extremely good and supportive, but some were really harsh.

2. Provable, tangible progress that you can show the kid. This is another reason repetition is so important, it's half of the motivation, even if the kid doesn't outwardly admit it.

Modern laptops, even simple ones like these, are too complex for a child to be interested in manipulating them, in my opinion. And I don't think the OLPC machines are powerful enough to do most enabling tasks that would help a student.

I've played with an OLPC laptop. The most interesting thing were the built-in programs to do stuff like measure distance using two OLPC laptops and sound. Not terribly accurate, I'm sure, but excellent for sparking discussion of physics.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5251340

One library (card) per child might be a better goal.

On the input side, each incoming class is different: they vary across geographic and socioeconomic lines, they're all affected by factors which occurred years before we ever got them in a classroom to begin with.

On the output side, we really _Don't_ know what we want. It's easy to say, "students who can read, write, and do math," but the devil, as always, is in the details - how do we measure that in a way that doesn't immediately become a metrics problem á la No Child Left Behind?. More than anything, we need to foster successful individuals - but we're not sure how to do that on a large scale and the education system is but one part of a child's life.

The answer in a lot of ways seems to be "Very Good Teachers" - but what makes a good teacher? What sort of support structure is required? Are we willing to pay for enough Very Good Teachers? Do we have enough? Can we train more?

Further, to what degree does the attempt to constrain the education system so we can quantify the results inhibit individuality? In assuring a child knows his multiplication tables, are we imposing a system that will prevent that child from the free expression that would eventually lead to a great artist? Many of our finest works - the pieces of art by which we define our culture, spring from people who would, by any other metric, be considered failures by a system intended to raise successful individuals.

All this is complicated by the fact that the end result of a good education system ultimately is a good society - something we won't know until 20, 30, 40 years later. Everything else is a proxy: We think a high college attendance or graduation rate will get us there, we think more scientists and engineers will get us there, we think more well-rounded individuals will get us there, but ultimately, we don't know what makes a good society, nor what works to get us there.

I think there are improvements we can make, teaching methods that work better than others, and probably ways to quantify some of those differences, but ultimately, we don't even know the bounds of the problem we're trying to solve in education.

I have two kids, 10 and 7, and a slightly obscene number of computers.

* They each have OLPC laptops, which they have no interest in. Occasionally, I'll dig one out to show them how they can manipulate the programs, but they quickly tire. No news there.

* We have a Touchpad and an iPad.

The TouchPad charges in the master bathroom, and is basically an extremely fancy radio for NPR in the morning and the kids use it as a Pandora radio in the afternoon. Please get CyanogenMod 9 stable on TouchPad. Please.

The iPad has games and sometimes has Netflix installed. I generally uninstall Netflix unless there's some compelling reason, like a road trip, to install it. But my wife has fairly well commandeered it as an e-book reader. We read e-books to kids before bed (eg, Nim's Island), which has proved a to be one way to condition the kids to understand the iPad is useful for something other than games. But, overall, if Netflix isn't installed, they mainly use it to play Pandora.

* They have access to two older, larger Dell laptops (dual and single core, 15" and 17", respectively) running Ubuntu, one in the spare room, one in serves as the main living room stereo, with Spotify piped to a big old Denon receiver. They occasionally use that one for music or the web; that's about it. There are probably a hundred games installed, they don't play them.

* We have a 27" iMac. They often use that for look-ups, occasionally a movie on the weekends, and occasionally some flash games. Whenever I see them playing flash games in the browser, I quietly ssh in and point that domain to localhost. The next time they visit, the browser errors out, and they move on. They also now use it to interact with the school's BlackBoard account (kill me now, please)

* There is a dual-monitor, two-CPU Dell in the garage, cobbled out of spare parts, running Ubuntu Studio, complete with condenser mic and keyboard.

We enforce a few rules

(1) No video or gaming during the day or school nights. The only exception is long trips.

(2) Sneaking off to your room with the iPad to watch video will result in the iPad being put in timeout, usually for several hours.

(3) Arguing over the iPad will similarly result in the iPad being put in timeout, even on trips.

Overall, the fantastically, overwhelmingly most common use of a computing device is music. The rest a 5-10% items. That is almost certainly due to the fact that we fight video and keep them otherwise engaged (Thing 1 is in gymnastics, Thing 2 is in piano, and rock climbs while Thing 1 is in gymnastics).

I will probably buy an iPad 3. I don't envision taking it to work. If CyanogenMod doesn't get stable on the TouchPad, I have considered buying two of the iPad 3s, but controlling what's on them.

So, again, I agree with the commenters who have observed from their own experience that young people are evaluating the utility of their tech just like the rest of us. If something's boring, or they are never exposed to it, they don't do it. Games and video are the lowest common denominator. It takes time to read. It takes time to do gymnastics and rock climbing and piano. We have to create a society where parents can and are encouraged, incentivized, to spend that time on their kids. Can Zynga get parents to spend more time with their kids?

(1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3590627 (2) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3590416