At CES today, One Laptop Per Child unveiled a revitalized line of gadgets for learning, including an education-specific tablet.

Other announcements include a new touchscreen version of the organization’s green-and-white laptop and a new software suite called the XO Learning System, an Android-based collection of apps for “child-centric learning.”

The XO tablet is a fairly standard Android tablet, but it features content — including a custom-built app store and an e-reader application — for young learners. The tablet is a 7-inch design from Sakar International, which will license the unit for online and in-store sales.

As for the XO Learning System, it seeks to capture students’ imaginations and aspirations, bringing books, multimedia content, interactive games, and content from big-name partners like Sesame Street into the educational mix. The tablets will also have full access to the Google Play marketplace of books, apps, and mobile games, but strict parental controls will be available

From the OLPC press release:

Every child has dreams, and XO Learning directs the child’s passion, creativity and energy for these dreams into a new user interface that has 12 dreams. Such dreams include “I want to be” an artist, a musician and a scientist. Each dream features a rich learning experience and applications, books, games, and videos that allow children ages 3 to 12 to naturally explore their dreams and learn at the same time.

The new laptops represent the fourth generation of OLPC hardware. It features a Marvell ARMADA multicore running at 1GHz as well as a Neonode touchscreen with multitouch capabilities. The dual-screen feature allows kids to use the laptop in full sunlight, and these devices will ship with Sugar educational software. Sugar gives students access to more than 300 apps and three programming environments for kids.

[Photo credits: OLPC, Dean Takahashi]

You might want to hold back on that $600 Mac Mini purchase for just a little bit longer. The Raspberry Pi, the little $25 computer that can run Quake 3 Arena and play HD videos, is scheduled to go into volume production in January. If you want to splurge, you can also pay a $10 premium for the fancy Model B that comes with an ethernet port and 256 – instead of 128 – MByte RAM.

In a new blog post, the developers report that the first finished circuit boards have arrived. “They’re undergoing electrical testing alongside hardware and software testing at the moment, and if all goes well, the Raspberry Pi you’ll be buying in January (or by auction later this month if they all work as they should) will be exactly like one of these.”, says Raspberry Pi blog editor Liz Upton.

The Raspberry Pi has grown in size since the last time we reported on it. An early prototype resembled a USB flash drive, but the new board is about as wide as two credit cards side by side. The Linux operating system runs from a SD card  The computer also has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard, and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

The $25 computer looks as bare bones as it gets, but its ARM11 CPU operating at 700 MHz seems quite capable of playing 1080p HD video.

The Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of engineer Eben Upton and British programmer David Braben, who co-created the pioneering 3D open-world game Elite. Their goal is to manufacture a computer that is so inexpensive that every student can be given one. Braben himself got started on computers as a student. His Elite game was created on Acorn’s BBC Micro, the most common computer at British schools in the mid-1980s. Braben is also the founder of Frontier Developments, the studio that created the virtual animal simulation Kinectimals for Microsoft.

The Raspberry Pi computer is a single-board computer that’s capable of rendering video games like Quake 3 at a 1920-by-1080 pixel monitor resolution. The game cruises along at around 20 frames per second with the lighting and geometrical details cranked up to maximum quality. It’s also running at a 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution, which brought the frame rate down slightly, Raspberry Pi foundation’s Eben Upton said. Considering the limited horsepower on the Pi, it’s still pretty impressive.

The computer has a 700-megahertz ARM processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. That’s about half as much memory as most smartphones today, which also sport processors that usually clock in at around 1 gigahertz. That makes it slightly weaker than a smartphone. There’s an SD card slot on the device that handles any storage, and it can output video and other images at 1080p resolution. It has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard, and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

(It’s also tiny — you can see it just under the monitor in the picture above.)

The Quake 3 version running is an open-sourced version of the game compiled for the Pi’s Linux build. The Pi sports a version of Linux, an open-sourced operating system that has become increasingly popular in philanthropic causes like this because it’s free to install and distribute. Braben said earlier he hopes the computer will be available to the public sometime later this year.

You can check out a full video of the demo below.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Game developer David Braben has created a computer that’s about the size of a flash drive — and it’ll most likely cost less than your last date.

Braben designed the device with the goal of having an extremely affordable computer that children across the world can access. It’s a similar goal the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project had — create an extremely affordable computer that children in both developing countries and first-world countries can get their hands on.

The device sports a version of Linux, an open-sourced operating system that has become increasingly popular in philanthropic causes like this because it’s free to install and distribute. It will likely ship with some variation of Ubuntu, a very popular Linux distribution that has a huge development community, according to tech news site Geek.com.

“In theory, they could be given away to the child. There would be other ways of funding it,” Braben said in an interview with BBC. “They would be able to engage with a lot of things that we are all consumers of but not necessarily creators of — understanding how you put together little scripts that might run on websites and filters.”

The device has a 700-megahertz ARM processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. To put that in perspective, that’s about half as much memory as most smartphones today, which also sport processors that usually clock in at around 1 gigahertz. So it’s slightly weaker than a smartphone. There’s an SD card slot on the device that handles any storage, and it can output video and other images at 1080p resolution. It has a USB-out port that lets owners plug in a keyboard and an HDMI-out port that can connect to an HDMI-enabled television or monitor.

Braben said he hopes the device will be available to the public in around a year. Based on the components, the device will cost somewhere between £10 and £15, or around $25. It will be distributed through a charitable organization called the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote computer science in schools.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One Laptop per Child and Marvell have joined forces to create a tablet computer that delivers a a better educational experience for schoolchildren in developing countries. This partnership may go a long way toward the nonprofit’s group of getting $100 computers in the hands of every child.

OLPC, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit started by former MIT MediaLab director Nicholas Negroponte, has a mission of providing a laptop to every child in the world. It has delivered 1.5 million laptops, but it has had a hard time fulfilling its mission in part because of the relatively high cost of components. The alliance is a significant one because it can bring OLPC’s vision closer to fruition, and because OLPC itself has had a profound influence on designs by the rest of the computer industry, which now cares about making lower-power, lower-cost devices for consumers.

That’s where Marvell’s new Moby educational tablet platform comes in. Marvell has created ARM-based chips that serve as the brains of a low-power tablet computer, and it has also come up with a design prototype for the entire tablet. Ed McNierney, chief technology officer of the OLPC Foundation, said in an interview that using Marvell’s design could accelerate the deployment of the X0 3.0 design (pictured) by two years. That’s because Marvell’s reference design (a full tablet computer blueprint) means that OLPC won’t have to do nearly as much custom engineering. Also, Marvell’s engineers will do much of the design work themselves.

Marvell will also bring the costs down because it plans a big push into education computers as part of its vision to expand computing, said Weili Dai, co-founder and vice president and general manager of the consumer and computing business at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell. Since the Moby platform could be used by many different customers, Marvell will be able to achieve cost efficiencies more easily and bring OLPC — whose current laptops cost $170 — within striking distance of its long-held goal of making $100 computers.

“The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with One Laptop per Child – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways,” said Dai. “It’s a good moral cause.”

Using Marvell’s technology, OLPC may be able to get its power consumption down from 5 watts to 1 or 2 watts. That means longer battery life as well as the ability to charge a device using solar power. McNierney said he was excited about the shift to a tablet style because it costs less to make. Also, it can use a software-based virtual keyboard, where you tap on a keyboard on a touchscreen of the device. That drives a lot of cost out because OLPC had to design and ship 117 different keyboards to accommodate all of the languages worldwide.

Another big shift is that OLPC will shift from higher-cost Intel-compatible (x86) microprocessors to Marvell’s 1-gigahertz ARM-based processors, which have lower cost and lower power. It will have powerful 3D graphics (at least for a tablet), high-definition video playback, two-way teleconferencing, and the ability to run Adobe’s full Flash software. The tablet will give kids access to as many as 1.7 million free books. And it will run Google’s Android operating system as well as versions of Linux and Windows.

OLPC’s competition is the standard Intel-based netbook (which is smaller than a laptop) and Intel’s Classmate PC, which has sold more than 2 million units worldwide. The Intel Classmate PC costs more and it isn’t designed for environments as harsh and power-challenged as OLPC’s are, McNierney said. (Intel, of course, disputes this.) Dai said Marvell hopes to announce a number of other customers for its educational tablet design in the future.