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Comment by voodoochilo | Hacker News Reader

yawn its not bout test scores but about hacking. getting the kids a chance to learn how computers work how to code and how to use a computer - that is the point of the olpc. i dislike this "standardized-tests-for-the-whole-world-globalist-mumbojumbo". let those kids enjoy and discover their new boxes, shut-up, wait ... and stop demanding results.

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> its not bout test scores

It's not about test scores, it's about verifiable and quantifiable results. Does dropping a computer in every kid's lap increase the number of hackers? Are we observing more opensource contributions from Peru which can be attributed to OLPC?

Is there an empirical reason to believe that this kind of subsidy is beneficial? This question deserves more than a yawn.

BBC micros in UK schools would be a good example of this kind of subsidy being beneficial.

It didn't matter that the chances of running into similar systems in industry were minute unless you ended up coding 6502 for factory automation. It gave a platform for children to experiment on and get used to the idea of coding.

Also, the percentage of children who this inspires doesn't even have to be particularly high for it to have definite beneficial economic effects further down the line and I would be amazed if this kind of effect would be measurable after less than 2 years.

i would even be happy with 10 years.

some learn to hack and to code, others verify and quantify. sounds pretty natural, doesn't it?

Indeed. My "OLPC" was a C64. I was terrible in school, but now I have a great career.

I wouldn't call my parent buying me a C64 a bad investment.

I have to agree with this. I'd consider myself to be in the same boat. I was poor in school because I was bored. However I invested hours upon hours learning to code in a bunch of different languages, was making html / javascript websites in notepad in 4th grade ('95) and by my senior year I had an expert level knowledge of Photoshop. My school never taught me any of this. My parents gave me our old family computer and we had an internet connection.

yes, that's the spirit and i love the idea that those kids won't have to pay 1,200 bucks for their first rig.

agree. the only class where my first computer (TI 99/4A, 1983) had a positive influence was English not Mathematics.

I'm from Germany and at the time they didn't translate the manuals, so my reading skills and vocabulary got far more additional training than the Math part. It didn't need that much math to write simple programs and the hex/binary stuff wasn't much use for school anyway.

I had one class that taught anything about computers in my teenage years (the laughable ECDL course), and I got kicked out on the first day. Nothing I knew about computers manifested in any of my exams in other subjects, but I loved the things.

Now I have a good job working with code, which I enjoy.

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