Mind blowing: Illiterate kids teach themselves to operate tablets with no help

[nichomachus]

This is absolutely amazing

Kids learn to operate -- and hack -- computers by themselves

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

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.”

Of course, it doesn't make me feel too good about the security of Android.

[Brickbat]

1. Certainly a testament to good design.

DIE ELEKTRO-BIBLIOTHEK.

[nichomachus]

2. If it had been Apple

They would probably have learned more quickly and wouldn't have been able to hack them.

[Egnever]

7. They didn't hack them.

It is incorrect terminology in the article. And if you pay any attention at all to the hacker conventions you know when it comes to hacking apple is routinely the first to go down.

[Egnever]

9. Apple hacked in less than five seconds at defcon convention last year

www.dailytech.com/Apples+OS+X+is+First+OS+to+be+Hacked+at+This+Years+Pwn2Own/article21097.htm


you don't do yourself or anyone else any favors perpetuating the myth that Apple is secure from hacking. Much better that you are aware of the risks and take steps to ensure you are protected.

[thereismore]

3. Mind blowing. nt

[1StrongBlackMan]

4. Color me ...

skeptical; but posting to for a deeper look, later.

[Egnever]

5. They didn't hack android

They disabled third party software designed to lock the home screen settings. Not remotely close to hacking android. I really find nothing remarkable about any of this. Tablets are very intuitive. My kids one and a half and three both use them with no intervention from us whatsoever and have no problem switching back and forth between android and apple.

[Panasonic]

6. My 3.5 year old son is an Android and Ipad expert

and loves to watch Angry Bird videos on Youtube. He is a HUGE fan.

And won't let go of my latest Samsung Galaxy 3 phone....

And he'll have his own iPad 2 soon - my wife's getting the 3rd generation at a good cost.

[Tikki]

8. "The Gods Must Be HAPPY"....

If they are not wasting the day playing noneducational online games, children can learn
a lot from the computer and the internets.

GO KIDS...


Tikki

[warrior1]

10. yea but the program a VCR?

[kurt_cagle]

11. Not at all surprised

My youngest daughter is Aspergers - intelligent, but with some odd developmental delays.

She took a long time to learn how to read books, but at the age of four she was routinely navigating the Internet to get to her favorite sites, and she figured out several linux video games (not child oriented) by the time she was six. In second grade, she went from not reading to reading at about a fourth grade level, as if the equivalency light went on between book content and web content. She figured out the game editors and cheat code interfaces for games like Sims2 & 3, and has a level of competence with both of these that is so close to actually programming the games as to not make much difference. Most of this was self taught.

I suspect that we're watching a quiet revolution in education going on, one that is radically challenging everything we ever knew about how people learn (and what the role of teachers should be)..