“Hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”
If you are motivated, you can teach yourself anything! You can learn and discover new things and solve tricky challenges. But how do you teach kids to learn? Education is focused on teaching kids facts and procedures. But what happens if you leave them alone and let them explore things.
Ethiopian kids who had never seen a printed word, taught themselves how to use a tablet and how to spell English words. The children in the village had no books, no newspapers and there were no street signs. So a common approach would be to teach these kids to letters and to read and. . . Or maybe not. . .
The project One Laptop Per Child provided children with Motorola Zoom tablet PC. That is, they provided the kids with boxes of tablets containing the tablets plus solar chargers. This is what happened.
“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.”
The children showed creativity and determination to find out more about the things in the boxes. Kids are curious and creative, if we provide them with opportunities to learn.
“The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kid’s tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that. “
The great thing was that the kids did not lose interest in the tablet and they were seen recharging the machines and reciting songs. The kids learnt to spell by using the tablets. In some villages, there is no one who can teach children to read and write and providing kids with a laptop could be a great leap forward towards helping them to learn all by themselves! There are at least two great things to be learnt by this story. Firstly, we need new ways to think about aid to developing countries where technology can provide help in new and often surprising ways that may change our perception of children. Secondly, although it may not always be suitable to leave kids alone to find out things, we may nevertheless provide all children with opportunities to learn and teach themselves.
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Photo “Kids Browsing The Internet” by Stuart Miles
