What If Every Child Had A Laptop?
7 05 2008Lesley Stahl Reports On The Dream And The Difficulties Of Getting A Computer To Every Child
By Lesley Stahl
60 Minutes
(CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on May 20, 2007.
It was updated on Nov. 30, 2007.
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There’s a new laptop on the market that’s being snapped up by parents looking for a unique holiday gift for their kids. It’s only $200, and it isn’t like any computer you’ve ever seen. But there’s a catch: in order to buy one for your child, you also have to buy one for a child in a poor country.
And that was the whole point behind these new laptops: to get them to kids in the most impoverished places, so they can become educated and part of the modern world.
As correspondent Lesley Stahl first reported last spring, the laptop, called the XO, was the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT.
Two years ago he founded a non-profit organization called “One Laptop Per Child,” through which he recruited a cadre of geeks to design a low-cost computer specifically for poor children.
Negroponte had a dream, a big one: that every child on the planet have a laptop, and along with it, the possibility of a better future.
Negroponte’s dream was born in Cambodia.
