Can a laptop computer make a difference in the life of a poor, barefoot 10-year-old living in rural Peru or in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria? Can you take a deprived child who has little or no educational opportunity, simply hand him or her a laptop and expect miracles to happen?

Sounds naïve, but thanks to an innovative program called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), children who once could only imagine themselves working in the rice fields or begging on the street corners are dreaming of a bigger futures. They now want to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers. What makes this possible is the laptop itself.

Called an "XO" and costing only $200, this shiny green laptop with rabbit ears has astonishing technology that makes it a magnet for kids while being virtually indestructible. Weighing just over three pounds, it is spill proof, rain proof, dust proof and virtually drop proof. It runs on a tenth of the power required to run a standard PC or Macintosh laptop, and has a wireless Internet connection as well as something called "mesh networking" that allows it to connect to other XOs in the area with one click of the mouse.

Children remotely located from each other using the XO can easily collaborate on documents, play music together, or communicate with their teacher if they are lucky enough to have one. If any of the laptops in the network have an Internet connection, they can all access it. No wonder kids in Arahuay, Peru, are powering up their XOs when they first wake up in the morning and sometimes even dozing off in front of it at night.

Unlike other laptops, the XO's razor-sharp screen can be viewed in the bright sun. It has a built-in video camera, microphone, graphics tablet, a screen that rotates, and software including a word processor, a painting application, three music programs, a chat program, and much more. It even comes loaded with about 200 books to read.

Developed by a small team of dedicated technologists and headed by the visionary founder of the MIT Media Lap, Nicholas Negroponte, the XO is so revolutionary that it scared Intel and Microsoft into launching their own low-cost computer programs targeted at the two billion poor children in this world. Luckily though, Microsoft has announced it is working on a version of its Windows software to run on the XO machine. Intel can't seem to get over the fact that the XO uses a chip from rival AMD.

You can help change the world by buying an XO for a deserving child at laptopgiving.org [1].