(photo by OLPC in NYC blog)

Evaluation of the Teaching Matters One Laptop Per Child (XO) Pilot at Kappa I V-

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Evaluation_of_the_Teaching_Matters_One_Laptop_Per_Child_.28XO.29_Pilot_at_Kappa_I_V

Some interesting notes as that might be relevent to a USB based implementation.

The pilot was done in a 6th grade at a Middle school. I would have guesed that the students at that age might have rebelled against some of the toy-like feel of the XO but infact a number of them appreciated that it was made for kids.

Parents and children were not concerned about safety when they took the XO home because it was kept in the backpack so no one knew it was there.  The XO were only used for a small percentage of the student population. Would theft and safety become an issue if everyone assumed that a child with a backpack had a laptop in it?

The biggest complaints were "Slow and Freezing".  I think this is a word to the wise to us to not try to go too far down the old computer continum.  It could be better to have less equiptment that works at a good speed them more where some are too slow.  I wonder if anyone has done any quantified studies as to how slow is too slow.

 Not having Internet access at home was another "broken" feature, as in users felt it was the XO's fault it didn't connect at home.  We will need to carefully look at the options and set appropriate expecations about Internet access at home.  

"Losing" work does seem to be an issue in the Laptop cart/computer lab school envirnoment. This is a feature we shoudl expect to see with a USB based implementation.

"Students were less likely to lose their work, not only because they always used the same machine but also because the XO has an automatic save feature that takes the user backto where he/she left off.  Because of this, the students felt they did not spend nearly as much time searching for, saving, moving, or reconstructiong previous work as they did when working on the laptops" (page 2)