Birmingham’s mayor agreed to buy 15,000 XO Laptops for $200 from the One Laptop Per Child organization, making Birmingham the first US city for purchase XO laptops for their schools, according to The Birmingham News. The laptops will be given to 1st through 8th graders for the purpose of closing the “digital divide.”

If you don’t already know, the XO laptop is a small, rugged Linux-powered laptop designed for children in third-world countries. Obviously, Alabama is not a third-world country, but that does not mean that the XO cannot do anything to help the school children in Alabama, too. Although the XO is designed for third-world countries, the goal of the project is to give every child a laptop, so they can learn about technology and use it as a general educational device. There ar, however, some challenges that Birmingham and the OLPC organization could face. Many of the children will be used to using Windows at school, even if they don’t have a PC at home, so the alternative GUI, known as Sugar, could confuse some of the children. Still, children tend to be very good at figuring out new things, and Sugar is designed to be intuitive and easy to use.

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