Dive Summary:
- At an emerging technology conference at MIT, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, spoke about a project in which Motorola Xoom tablets were simply dropped off in two remote Ethiopian villages.
- Although the children in the village had never seen English words before, within weeks they were singing the ABCs, learning to spell, using the tablet's apps and even hacking their way around restrictions.
- Previous research on the subject includes the "Hole in the Wall" project in which children in the New Dehli slums were given a computer and, without any training, were able to acquire basic computing skills.
From the article:
"... Although the OLPC founder says the group expected most of the children to spend their time 'playing with the boxes,' in a matter of minutes they had powered up the devices and, within days, they were using a number of apps included with the system. Even more remarkably, within weeks, they had figured out how to 'hack' their way around restrictions built into the software to change the laptop’s display background. Thanks to the tablets, they were singing ABC songs and even spelling words in English.
Said Negroponte: '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. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera.' ..."
