The $200 million initiative, inspired by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and paid for by the Peruvian government, was an grand initiative that tried to leverage digital technology in the fight against poverty.  

But now, five years later, there are serious doubts about whether the largest single deployment in the One Laptop Per Child initiative was worth the money.

Ill-prepared rural teachers and administrators were too often unable to fathom much less teach with the machines, software bugs didn't get fixed, Internet access was almost universally absent and cultural disconnects kept kids from benefitting from the machines.