Coding with Fountain Pens

One Laptop Per Child is an effort to produce a $100 laptop that can be distributed en masse to the school children of the world.  The first pass attempt at the hardware was going for $200, featured a 400 MHz CPU, flash for storage and wifi. And it’s powered by winding.

That’s great, but the second generation machine looks very interesting, both the screen and keyboard portions, as we’d conventionally describe them, appear to be multi-touch displays, offering a number of ways to use the device. You have to check out these pictures to see what I mean.

Nicholas Negroponte’s TED talk describes the concept:

I’m not convinced this is the educational silver bullet it’s sold as, but I’m interested to see how it develops over time.