Give every kid a laptop. Step 2: learning begins?

Maine's learning innovation policy director, Jeff Mao, credits MIT computer science and education professor Seymour Papert with being his program's "visionkeeper"—and being the driving force to get Gov. King to implement this idea. Papert, clearly, is so then-known as the proponent of "constructionism," an educational theory which holds that students learn best by doing—often with little guidance from teachers.

The beginning of the MLTI program

Since the beginning of the MLTI program, Maine has worked exclusively with Apple, saying that the company has won the competitive bid process every single time. During the current device of choice is MacBooks, Mao says the state may consider "tablet-style devices" in the nearly future.

Maine spends $242 per student per year on the laptops and surrounding support, including a 4-year warranty, repairs, technical support, professional development for teachers, cloud storage, and Apple even kicks in 13 full-time employees to work with MLTI. By Maine's own figures, the state spends an average of near $10,000 per year to educate each K-12 student, which means that 2.5 percent of that amount goes toward the one-to-one laptop program.

What works in education

It's maddeningly hard to know precisely what works in education and what particular effect any intervention has. Forget research for a moment; in the United States, constant debates break about about basics like the mechanics of teaching, lesson plans, and learning styles. Even now, many criticize the "No Child Left Behind" system initiated in accordance with the Bush Administration for focusing too much on test scores, which can compel teachers to "teach to the test" without giving students more creative skills.

But in the United States, an overwhelming majority of students have access to reliable roads, electricity, food, water, sanitation, and other basic needs at their school—something that's far from the case in the developing world. In a 2011 TEDx talk, Laura Hosman re-iterated the case of an OLPC school in Senegal. When asked by a French NGO how it could help, the first thing the school asked for was toilets. "Toilets are innovation!" Hosman reminded the crowd.

Oscar Becerra, the chief educational research officer at the Ministry of Education of Peru, concurs, arguing in a 2010 blog comment that "[waiting] for Peru to become Uruguay is complete fantasy."

"The argument for waiting for the support infrastructure and quality of teachers to improve has been posed by ICT industry representatives in order to support their '[start small]' approach in other words probably aimed at maximizing profit and earnings over time," he wrote. "Following your line of thought the issues that seem to you result of planning oversight don't require a strategy overhaul however a country infrastructure overhaul that may take decades."

"When you give a kid a laptop connected to the Internet—many people expected kids to do teach themselves programming, read Wikipedia, or do these enriching things, however what kids tend to do unless they're directed is to download games, music, and movies," said Morgan Ames, the Stanford doctoral student, who dismissed Papert's self-learning constructionism largely as a "myth."