Alex Little

My previous comments about the computing ability of some of the Computer Science students may not have been too generous, however, if they’d all been given a laptop on arrival at Uni, something like an Asus EEE PC or OLPC XO, I’m sure many would not be having the problems I mentioned.

The OLPC project is certainly having some problems and I previously criticised how the OLPC laptops were being used in schools. Looking back now I realise that maybe the project isn’t meeting it’s intended aims, but even if it’s just getting students used to being able to use a keyboard and a computer generally, then surely that’s not a bad thing? I’m dealing with first year computer science students who have little idea about even login names, passwords or keyboards.

In the last week I conducted a mini-survey amongst our Computer Science Uni students about their access to computers and attitudes towards having access to course materials online, almost all (around 90%) said that access to a computer was one of their main problems. Given that this survey was online (OK, maybe not my brightest of ideas for this type of survey!), the total figure is likely to be more than 90%. For info, there are about 10-15 working PC’s per 80-90 computer science students and less than 10% have access to a PC outside the those provided by the university.

I’m sure that giving the uni students a laptop, even just a cheap one, would be immensely beneficial to the next generation of computer science students/graduates. So if anyone is looking to improve the computing capabilities of those in the developing world, you could no worse than providing laptops to university level students. In my opinion, the more access and practise students have with PCs, be that Window or Unix, the better.

As an aside, I’ve been quite surprised by the number of university computer science students who don’t yet have an email address. I hadn’t even thought to ask this in my survey, but it’s come up in training sessions, when students fill in their profile, many have asked what to enter in the email field if they don’t have an email address!