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One of those inspired by what Papert had to say was Nicholas Negroponte – brother of John, George Bush's controversial director of national intelligence – a student and later colleague of Papert at MIT, who would become the founder and driving force behind One Laptop Per Child. Although he is a wealthy pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, an investor in technological start-ups and sometime predictor of the future through his writings on the benefits of technology to humankind, it has, however, been One Laptop Per Child that has become Negroponte's most ambitious project. He is taking Papert's ideas and making them reality, applying himself to his dream of what has been referred to as "techno-utopianism" – the belief that science and technology can bring about profound beneficial social change.
Indeed in a lecture by Negroponte from 2006, describing his vision for One Laptop Per Child, he declared that education, delivered in the context of the XO, is potentially the "solution to [the problems of] poverty, peace and the environment".
David Cavallo, a former student of Papert and a colleague of Negroponte, has taken a leave of absence from MIT to crisscross the globe with the XO, introducing it to the world's most impoverished children. The son of an Italian anarchist who fled his home in the second world war, his own journey to Rwanda from Ohio, where he grew up, has been guided by a similar radicalism to his father's, one that saw him drawn as a student to the University of California's Berkeley campus, attracted by its history of protest. But anger, says Cavallo, was not enough. What he wanted were practical solutions that changed the world, not rhetoric that simply described how bad it was. It was a need that would lead him eventually to be part of One Laptop and to settle with his family in Kigali.
He hands me one of the computers. A little larger than a box of chocolates, it is one of the first 100,000 XOs destined for distribution around the country by a government that has bought them at a cost of $181 each. The next generation will be a plastic-coated tablet. Indestructible, it is hoped. Costing less than $100.
The keyboard is small for my fingers but it was never intended for an adult. The desktop appears as an unfamiliar cartwheel of programmes represented by child-friendly icons. Cavallo flips it over, converting it at once into a games console.