DANNY O'BRIEN WIREDIT WAS my daughter's fifth birthday a few weeks ago. Of course, my preferred gift to her would be a bowl of gruel and a character-building exhortation to go work for a living. Sadly, America, and Silicon Valley in particular, looks fondly on its younger members and I'm afraid she was a little spoilt with technological gadgets this year.
Is five too young for gadgetry? Not here and, if the Valley has its way, not anywhere. Her biggest present, its cost shared by two grandparents (who, thanks to the weak dollar, are rather more affluent here than at home in Britain), was one of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) machines.
The OLPC XO, which you might remember as the $100 laptop, costs rather more than $100 at the moment; it was bought as part of OLPC's limited-time "buy one, give one" campaign, where about $400 would get you a $188 laptop, and pay for another, delivered to a child in a developing country (where the OLPC is intended to be distributed by governments as part of public education).
OLPC's designer, Mary Lou Jepsen, recently left the organisation with a promise to bring its innovative, low-price technology to the commercial market (her aim, she said, is to create a $75 laptop).
If the XO is anything to go by, it should be an amazing artefact. The device is as tough as a Tonka toy, but able to run any Linux program.
My daughter has been learning reading by typing words into its speech synthesiser, looking at picture books, and even playing at programming with its built-in Turtle Graphics program. We've run updates to newer, faster versions of the system, and she has even met and worked communally with other children who have their own XOs - a shadow of what the PC, which is designed to allow communal learning between 30-40 kids in a classroom, can do.
But what's fascinating to me is how general-purpose computers, the mainstay of the digital revolution, are now percolating to every part of society, including children. And as the prices drop, these will end up being the gifts our children will use as part of their everyday learning.
You don't have to own anything as obvious as a child's laptop to end up with general-purpose power. Another gift was from a friend who works at Ugobe, a local company that has been working on a realistic, smart robot dinosaur toy called Pleo.
Like the XO, Pleo looks and feels like a toy - until you turn it on. Instead of being a dinosaur doll, Pleo comes alive, its internal servo-motors whirring as it walks, looks around, and responds to its environment.
Is a dinosaur toy really a general-purpose computer? Absolutely. Buried in this green lizard's two ARM processors (as used in the iPod), is a fistful of sensors (including infra-red, directional microphones, 14 touch sensors), and most importantly, a USB and memory card interface.
That connection to the outside world means Pleo can be upgraded. This week saw the release of the 1.1 version of her "LifeOS": new features include abilities for Pleo to sit, sing and catch a cold. It also means that Pleo can be reprogrammed and controlled by its owner; which means that Pleo is not just a toy, but a robotic platform. Already some hackers have created programs that let you design poses and "dances" for your pet. Ugobe has said that they will provide a more open and powerful interface for home experimenters soon.
As someone who had their mind warped by programming manuals and a simple home computer at age eight, it amazes me that the next generation will have the opportunity to actively learn and manipulate the software underlying these incredibly sophisticated machines - and at an even earlier age.
Right now, my daughter and her friends can simultaneously see Pleo as a playmate (they took no time in making a hat for her, teaching her to walk, and deciding she was very sick and in need of some improvised hospital treatment), and as a computer waiting to be re-programmed.
Pleo is costly too - for now. But the inevitable price drop means that at some point, children will be able to have a walking, sensing, robot friend, and a powerful laptop with which to control it, for less than a €100.
It's a tremendous power that we're handing over: one which I think will belie the old saw that the next generation only sees computers as tools to be used.
Instead, I think we're starting to give our children an early taste of the power of programming - of coding as part of basic literacy. These children work with these toys as actively and imaginatively as they work with wooden blocks and Meccano sets.
The difference is that the technology is the same as in the grown-up world. There's no difference between the programming language that the XO teaches you and the one that powers Google.
The servo-motors and sensors on the Pleo are the same as on industrial robots. Our children can use what they learn with these blocks and toy bridges to build buildings and span rivers.
