The RUCA Project and Digital Inclusion

The XO (OLPC's "one hundred dollar laptop") is under evaluation by the Brazilian Government as a possible educational tool and also as a means of promoting digital inclusion. The laptops would be distributed to school children to use during classes and to take home. The RUCA project was created to validate the network capabilities of the XOs. In this paper we focus on one particular aspect of these tests, namely the feasibility of the XO as a digital inclusion aid device. The premise to be tested is the following. If children take their laptops home would they be able to communicate to each other and with the school? Will the novel 802.11s implementation (the first implementation of the IEEE draft) be successful in forming a mesh network to interconnect children in a low cost, infra-structure free environment? Will its performance suffice? Here, we present some answers that indicate that although further testing is still required, the results are encouraging.