Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, sure knows how to get people's attention. About three months ago, the venerable ed-tech evangelist told the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco that his organization would "literally take tablets and drop them out of helicopters," and return a year later to see if the effort was a success.

While the comment has faced criticism from those in technology and education circles, it certainly made a splash. OLPC still makes a laptop (the XO 1.75), but the organization now has its eyes firmly set on its new tablet (the XO 3), a solar-powered device that the group describes as "unbreakable and without holes in it."

But OLPC's visions have never quite materialized. Negroponte's "tablets from helicopters" comment was reminiscent of his earlier announcement at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, where he proclaimed OLPC would sell a laptop for $100. Then in 2009, OLPC announced that its tablet would also break the $100 barrier, despite the fact that the original laptop project had never reached that price (it still hasn't; the price remains about $185).

Negroponte originally hoped his organization would sell "tens of millions" of laptops and could get the price low by requiring each country that wanted the machines to buy a minimum of one million, a figure that never panned out.

This wasn't entirely the fault of OLPC. The plan was launched long before netbooks or tablets hit the scene—seven years is a lifetime in the tech world. Besides, as OLPC's own leadership likes to say, it should be judged more on the merits of its educational progress than on its hardware.

"We are an education group, we are not a laptop group," said Rodrigo Arboleda, the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Association, the Miami-based part of the group tasked with getting the laptops out to schoolkids. "We are not interested in being in a competitive environment—selling laptops for the sake of selling laptops. We are here to create a revolution in education."

As of 2012, OLPC has doled out over two million computers across 42 countries, in places as diverse as the Solomon Islands (300 machines), Haiti (15,000), Mongolia (14,500), and Iraq (9,000). Its most widespread deployment to date (by percentage of population) is in Uruguay, where over 500,000 laptops have been given out to every single elementary school student—nearly one-seventh the population of the entire country. It's an ambitious program locally called "Plan Ceibal."

Peru, with its much larger population of over 29 million people, has an OLPC deployment of 700,000—making the two countries home to around half of all XO machines in the world.

By comparison, the next largest such program outside of OLPC, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, has distributed MacBooks to all of its middle school students and half of its high school students. [Update: other national programs using Classmate PCs, such as those in Portugal and Argentina, are actually larger than Maine's.] The Maine program, now in its 10th year, began with 17,000 iBooks for middle school students.

So OLPC does have a scale that makes it worth examining. What, if any, educational goals has it achieved? And what are the larger lessons here for the use of technology in education?

Plan Ceibal

In Uruguay, the first pilot deployment of Plan Ceibal began in 2007 in the town of Villa Cardal, a town of just over 1,000 people in the southern part of the country. According to a 2011 report from the Inter-American Development Bank, the plan also had "broad political support from the Presidency of the Republic," adding that "all subsequent electoral candidates promised to preserve and continue the plan." The IDB added that the initial investment was $100 million, or 17 percent of the national budget for primary education.

The Uruguayan model has drawn plenty of praise from ed-tech scholars and observers. Many point to the fact that all schools now have Internet connectivity, free WiFi exists in at least some public spaces, and Internet access has entered the home—Uruguayan families only pay for the router itself. Of course, it helps that Uruguay is a small country to begin with—98 percent of its 3 million people are literate, living across an area slightly smaller than Washington state.

Uruguayan teachers can submit and then vote on lesson plans submitted to the Plan Ceibal Educational Portal, which contains a number of online resources in multiple subjects, including arts and foreign languages.

In addition, Uruguay has proved adept at creating a system for repairing the laptops quickly. An Uruguayan government study found that, as of April 2010, over 27 percent of the country's XO laptops were non-functional. Originally, all laptops had to be sent to the capital city, Montevideo, which required parents to call a repair center, get a shipping number, and then send it from any national post office for free. But many parents didn't know the phone number, didn't want to call because it was too expensive, or didn't want to send the computer through the postal system.

In 2010, Plan Ceibal changed the repair process to include a dozen mobile repair teams deployed throughout the country, and it launched new partnerships with local repair shops and other businesses that can be trained in fixing the XOs. Local government figures show that the number of functional laptops is on the rise and reached nearly 77 percent by May 2011.

Still, so many computers out of commission would seem to diminish the actual practical idea of "one laptop per child."

"Imagine if [even] 10 percent of your children didn't have pencil and paper," said Christoph Derndorfer, an Austrian computer science student, and the editor of OLPCNews.com. "It's hard to try and teach if all of the children don't have the same tools."

Still, the program has achieved extensive reach in Uruguay—what has it accomplished? Even though the Uruguayan program is now in its fifth year, there seems little if any evidence that the program has had any direct, causal educational impact.

Derndorfer took an extensive trip to Uruguay and other South American OLPC deployment countries in 2010, and he presented his findings at the World Bank in Washington, DC later that year.

"The impression I got after speaking to a variety of people in Uruguay is that although these materials exist and are available to pupils and teachers—thanks to the near ubiquity of Internet access in schools—there's a lack of knowledge of how to actually use and integrate them in the classroom context," he wrote in October 2010. "Additionally, some teachers mentioned being overwhelmed by the broad variety of choices with a subject area rather than being able to rely on a single text book as has generally been the case up to now."

The Uruguayan government's own figures from 2010 say that barely half of teachers (55 percent) use the XO laptop "for pedagogical purposes," and that most teachers felt that they had inadequate training in order to integrate the computers into their lessons.

The importance of battery chargers

Peru has its 700,000 laptops deployed across much of the country. As of 2007, the Peruvian government made a conscious decision to focus at first on the country's most rural poor in the parts of the country that are hardest to reach and that have the least access to paved roads, electricity, and Internet access.

Independent studies of the Peruvian OLPC program have been less than stellar.

"In the classes that were observed during the qualitative evaluation, it was noted that laptops were being regularly used between two or three times a week and daily, but in most cases their use has not substantially changed the practices," wrote the authors of a 2010 Inter-American Development Bank paper. "Additionally, it can be observed that there is a tendency for students to transcribe texts from notebooks or chalkboards to their laptops in order to edit them later."

The paper added that "only 10.5 percent of the teachers reported having received technical support, and 7.0 percent reported having received pedagogical support for the implementation of the program at their schools."

Other researchers have found the presence of OLPC to be disruptive in a classroom environment.

Morgan Ames, a doctoral student at Stanford University who is studying the impact of OLPC in Paraguay, said that classes with XO laptops often have to spend 30 minutes simply to get as many students as possible set up. That's because half of the students might not bring their laptop, or might say that theirs was broken, or might have some other excuse—and would then need to borrow one from a classmate or a relative in the same school.

"When you only have three hours of instruction a day, that's a fairly large chunk of your day just starting up," Ames said, adding that kids often run out of batteries during the lesson and that the chargers were one of the first XO pieces to break. The result: chains of chargers going round the room, often being swapped between machines.

"A lot of teachers said they would love to use the laptop, but said that it was so costly in terms of time that they would only get through half the material that they would otherwise," she noted.

Ames also said that based on her field study, the laptops were not nearly as rugged as Nicholas Negroponte makes them out to be. As a demonstration, he has often thrown his laptop across a conference stage—but given that many students are hitting them against tiled floors or concrete play areas, particularly when the screen is exposed, this is hardly a good test. In this case, as in many others, the gulf between what sounds good on a PowerPoint slide in front of a Western audience and how the XO laptops are actually used in the developing world remains huge.

But what happens when "one-to-one" laptop programs make their way to a place like Maine?