IN FOCUS: One Laptop Meets Big Business (at BusinessWeek)

The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child Peruvian student Justo Miguel Común is in the fifth grade. He got his XO laptop in late April. Jeffery Salter/Redux One by one, the children ran into the school yard, lining up in a grassy field next to a low-slung building of classrooms topped by a rusty steel roof. Most of these children in Luquia, a tiny, impoverished town 13,200 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, wore ragged navy-blue uniforms, and many had not bathed in days. Their small adobe homes have dirt floors, no running water, and no bathrooms. They share sleeping space with dozens of squeaking guinea pigs, which scamper underfoot before becoming the family's rare meal of meat. The children, then, were... [read full story]