The Face of the $100 Laptop

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The project leaders hired Pentagram to help out with the visual design of the interface. The Pentagram designers have kept the icons spare and universal so kids can understand them instantly no matter where they are growing up. Text labels are kept very short. The "zoom" feature is being designed so kids see the transition from individual, to group, to village as if they're in a helicopter lifting off from the earth. "We're trying to use as many references as we can to the physical world so it will be easy for kids who haven't used a computer before to use this foreign thing," says Lisa Strausfeld, the Pentagram partner whose team is working on Sugar.

Kids Can Tweak the Code

The interface is being designed to encourage the users themselves to explore—and improve on—its inner workings. Bender chose a software programming language called Python that's simple enough for more-tech-minded children to learn. If a student is playing a game on the computer, he can actually look at the game's code and modify it—say, changing the colors on the screen. If the student makes a mistake, he can restore the program to its original form with the click of a button. "The machine is a tool, but it's also an experience. It's a way to be creative," says Blizzard.

To that end, Sugar offers a simple technique for moving objects—a document, say, or an image—from one application to another. A student can pluck a photo off of a Web site by clicking on it and dragging it to the left side of the frame. Then, after she launches another activity on the display screen, she can click on the icon for the photo and drag it onto the screen. The drop-off spot on the frame is conceived as a "pocket" that the kids can use to carry around things they want to use later.

The Journal, another nifty feature, allows youngsters to create a record of what they did with the software and what they thought about it that can later be shared with others. Once a Journal reaches a certain size, earlier entries are automatically shifted to a more powerful computer on the network. Documents and photographs can be stored in the same way.

While the Sugar team hasn't run any formal usability tests yet, Bender et al. have received unscientific feedback from a number of children who have tried the machine. Typically, says Bender, the kids get totally absorbed and disappear for hours. Now he’s glad to be able to test Sugar in real-world situations. The first 2500 Beta 2 machines are being distributed to schools in participating countries, and OLPC will finally receive more substantial user feedback. "I’m sure we have the basics down, but we can still make changes," he says. "We want to get this right."

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.