Aug. 21--In a small apartment on Madison's South Side, nine children arrive for summer camp and immediately begin pulling out small, lime-green computers from oversized backpacks.

"I want to take a photo of my shirt and put it in my computer," 8-year-old Giovanny Melchor shouts excitedly.

"I got my song. You wanna hear it?" 10-year-old Alejandro Mendez asks, before pushing a button and unleashing a lively melody.

The computers don't look like the average Dell or Mac, and they don't work like them either. Called XOs, they resemble Fisher-Price toys, brightly colored with two antennas that stick up like bunny ears so the computers can communicate with each other wirelessly.

The campers are part of a new UW-Madison research project to test the effectiveness of the laptop computers as a learning tool, which were specially designed for children in developing nations.

It is unusual for U.S. children to have access to the laptops. They were the brainchild of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte, who dreamed of putting them in the hands of every child at, eventually, a cost of $100 each.

The idea is that they allow children to teach themselves and others by exploring the different applications and uses of the computers.

But Negroponte didn't envision them at work in the U.S. You can buy one for a child in an impoverished country for $200, but they're not for sale in the U.S. right now. It took the political will of outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley to get them to Madison.

Wiley saw the program, called One Laptop Per Child, featured in a "60 Minutes" television segment.

"And I thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be great if we had a program like that for U.S. schools, especially in neighborhoods that are depressed?'â??â??" Wiley said. "We've got some inner-city schools in this country that are almost as bad off as Rwanda or Guatemala. If it's such a powerful tool for engaging the interest of young kids in other countries, why wouldn't it be equally effective for our own kids?"

So Wiley posed the question to Negroponte, who responded with a list of potential problems. It would be politically difficult, he said. Thousands of school districts would have to agree to integrate the computers into the curricula.

Many Americans are wealthy enough to buy fancier computers. The U.S. spends so much on education already, an inexpensive computer wouldn't make much of a difference.

Wiley thought that was the end of their conversation. Until, out of the blue, Negroponte e-mailed him in March and said he was starting a U.S. program.