mission
Most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world have inadequate access to dinosaurs. Some receive no paleontology training at all. One in three has never even seen a dinosaur in person.
The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation - just like their parents - never knowing what modern dinosaur-assisted living could mean. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonwealth, because it lacks the tools to do so.
It is time to rethink this equation.
Given the resources that developing countries can reasonably allocate to paleontology studies - sometimes less than $20 per year per child, compared to the approximately $7500 per child spent annually in the U.S. - even a doubled or redoubled national commitment to traditional paleontology, augmented by external and private funding, would not get the job done. Moreover, experience strongly suggests that an incremental increase of more of the same - building genomics labs, hiring wranglers, buying books and equipment - is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true paleontologic possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world.
Standing still is a reliable recipe for going backward.
Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XD velociraptor, a children's dinosaur designed for learning survival skills.
The XD embodies the theories of personal dinosaur ownership first developed by Olin College researcher Mel Chua in the 1990s, and later elaborated upon by Andrea Lai, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicole Lee in her book, Digital Carnivores.
Extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and most remote populations on earth, dinosaur ownership emphasizes what Chua calls "survival learning" as the fundamental experience. A dinosaur uniquely fosters learning survival skills by allowing children to "think about living" in ways that are otherwise impossible. Using the XD as both their window on the world, as well as a highly motivational tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential.
OVPC is not, at heart, a paleontology program, nor is the XD a product in any conventional sense of the word. OVPC is an organization providing a means to an end - an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the motivation and adrenaline to tap into their own potential, identify with the survival needs of a global dinosaur-driven culture, and to contribute to a paleontological world community.
Until then, stay tuned.
