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OLPC’s Negroponte Honored by LEGO® Group
By Wade Roush, April 13, 2010
It seems only fitting that the creators of one of the most popular children’s
toys in history would want to honor the creator of the most successful
children’s computer in history.
Today the Denmark-based LEGO Group, of plastic brick fame, announced that it has
awarded its $100,000 LEGO Prize to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT
Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.
The company said that the prize, which it created in 1985, was being awarded to
Negroponte “for his passionate vision of one laptop per child and his ability to
make his vision come alive.” Nearly 2 million XO Laptops built by the foundation
have been distributed to children in 40 countries.
“In the LEGO Group, we see children as our role models,” LEGO owner Kjeld Kirk
Kristiansen said in a statement. “Children look at the world with open eyes,
unconstrained by the past and willing to ask why? And what if? By connecting
them and enabling them to learn and develop, OLPC creates totally new
possibilities and a hope for a much brighter future for the world.”
Reached by Xconomy in Copenhagen, where he will receive the prize at today’s
LEGO Idea Conference, Negroponte said the most important meaning of the prize
was that “Both OLPC and LEGO stand for learning by playing.”
Negroponte’s association with the LEGO Group is a longstanding one: the company
was one of the earliest sponsors of the Media Lab, where researchers’ offices
are perennially littered with LEGO bricks. “We are celebrating our 26th year of
collaboration with Lego,” Negroponte says, so visiting Copenghagen to pick up
the award “may be more like (being with) family.”
I asked Negroponte how the prize helps to validate OLPC’s mission of supplying
low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. “There is not much left to
validate any more,” he replied, via e-mail. “The only open question is how to
pay for OLPC. The full cost of acquisition and ownership is $1 per week per
child.”
Negroponte said he doesn’t have any plans so far for using the prize money. The
last person to receive the LEGO Prize was New Hampshire-based inventor and
entrepreneur Dean Kamen, in 2008.
Xconomy.com
-end of report-
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