What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:


"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] 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 it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

 spiralingcadaver wrote:
Wow, that's pretty cool stuff. Not sure about the ethics, but very interesting.

 daedalus wrote:

 spiralingcadaver wrote:
Wow, that's pretty cool stuff. Not sure about the ethics, but very interesting.

The ethics? I mean, if you have the cash to do this, OMPC (one meal per child) might be a better program, at least for the short-run, but on the other hand this is pretty awesome. Better spent resources letting them teach themselves to learn and think for themselves than to teach them the kind of dogma that is normally brought to undeveloped countries. They learn to think for themselves and get to exercise the intelligence they might possess, who knows? They might be able to improve their own situation themselves.

Testing stuff on kids without consent or government supervision. Not nearly as bad as "giving away" medicine to test it-- maybe not the same ballpark, but I'd call it the same sport...

 Ratbarf wrote:

Testing stuff on kids without consent or government supervision. Not nearly as bad as "giving away" medicine to test it-- maybe not the same ballpark, but I'd call it the same sport...

I wouldn't, not much that can happen with tablets unless they decided to eat them. Also, what would say if they just left toys out for them to see if they would play with them? Would that be unethical? How about if the tablets just got delivered there by accident? Would you be worried about them? The fact that tablets are pretty innoculous supercedes the thought that it's inherently unethical because something was tested on children.