In order to help documenting how people learn, we imagine minimalist infrastructure such as paper notebooks or very simple computers to record ideas, read, think, communicate between peers using minimal energy & program from the ground up.
The idea is not to solve poverty, ecological crisis or political inequity with technology (solutionism) but to recognize how these challenges might also be addressed from the perspective of minimal yet powerful technical infrastructures at human scale, which are understandable, buildable and limitable by anyone.
These are propositions ( a complex puzzle needs a picture on the box ):
A documentation-oriented paper notebook.
A sub-dollar concatenative (forth/fonc) chip in a rugged USB key form factor, with micro-screen, GPIO, battery, network, radio, text-only shell, remote terminal & TF storage preloaded with Sugar on a stick & live Debian
Zero board inserted in host keyboard + display OLED/TFT + outputs :ntsc ::vga :::videoproj
Zero board with a small camera
A few dollars linux box with big storage (wikipedia, wikimed, stackoverflow, hacker news…), high-speed networking and graphics.
Sugar, Proce55ing, ShaderToys, Squeak, eToys, Sugar, Scratch, Python, Forth, Smalltalk, C for children … (non-exhaustive list)
Peripherals
Zero atom
Programmable matter module composed of active biopolymers or other future active biomaterials.
→ towards a programmable matter kindergarten (softmatter loose parts)
Tangible Asynchronous / Mesh programming (e.g. think of RALA / FLEET for non-electronic substrate).
Digital simulation in an asynchronous chip (e.g GA144) bootstrappable by children.