(no subject)

[telophase]

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Comments

[yhlee]

Awesome. Thanks for the link.

[telophase]

Be sure to check out this interview that someone dropped in the LJ comments, about a similar experiment in India!

[yhlee]

That is also very cool. Thank you!

[metaphortunate]

Brilliant.

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Read a similar story a few years ago about kids in India. (http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm)

Kids constantly make me reevaluate what smart and ingenuity mean.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that article! I'd heard of that experiment, but hadn't read that interview.

It's like they say: kids are natural scientists, and the educational system is very good at training them out of their natural curiosity and experimentation.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

That is kind of awesome.