Nick Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, is spearheading a mission to empower the education of the world's poorest children, a group which numbers in the hundreds of millions. OLPC, Negroponte's nonprofit, has the ambitious goal of providing poor children around the world with electricity-independent, wireless laptops with basic word processing, Internet, and email capabilities. Their premise is that if given access to the tools and some creative teaching aids, these illiterate children can ultimately teach themselves to read. From there, they believe children's curiosity will kick in, and the barriers to learning will begin to crumble.