(Image Source: Playback / Dvice)

What are the prerequisites for good learning? A thoughtful teacher with a respectable cultural background? Perhaps. The problem is that not only is it difficult in certain parts of Africa to find educated adults, it is quite rare to come across someone who can read and write.

This makes things difficult, of course - but it also serves as a trigger for some really creative proposals, such as the latest project of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Armed with thousands of Motorola Xooms, some members of the organization left for Ethiopia to distribute the copies to several children who not only were unaware of technologies of the genre but had never seen a single printed word.

From no knowledge to an Android hack

The differential? The boxes were just left there without any instruction - at least nothing but “How about these boxes? Do what you want with them. ” The idea was simple: apply a self-learning lesson to the children and then collect the results of the experiment that would be recorded on a memory card built into each Xoom.

(Image Source: Playback / MIT)

Here's the pleasant surprise, however, as OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte himself described during a conference at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology):

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed Sealed. Without any instruction and no one to explain. I thought the kids would play with the boxes! But within minutes, a child not only opened the box but also found the on / off button. He had never seen an on / off button. He turned on the tablet. In five days, they were using an average of 47 apps per child per day. ”

And he goes on:

“In a few weeks, they started singing English songs through the village. And after five months they hacked Android. That's because some idiot in our organization or Media Lab had disabled the camera. They found out there was a camera and changed Android [bold of us]. ”

The OLPC experiment began earlier this year and aimed to see if children could learn to read and write in English. In fact, the experience went beyond boys and girls. As some previous studies of the organization have shown, it is common for children to learn and teach their own parents.