Ethiopian kids hack OLPC's Motorola Zoom tablet PCs in 5 months with no instruction

[Are_grits_groceries]

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."
<snip>
http://nbcu.mo2do.net/s/18488/29?itemId=tag:dvice.com,2012://3.92265&fullPageURL=/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

Okay.I officially now feel very stupid.

[sadbear]

1. Kids can do anything with technology.

I remember programming the VCR when I was little, but I'm clueless today.

[Indpndnt]

2. Agreed. Definitely.

Kids are amazing with technology. Toss in their boundless imaginations and incredible things happen.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. Some times, zero instruction is best.

You want to learn how to think? Pick up a tool. If you want to learn what to think, go to school.

[GaYellowDawg]

7. Most of the time, it's not.

Next time you're sick, try going to a doctor who didn't go to medical school and see how far that gets you. Or you could make up your own ideas about what causes lightning, or earthquakes, or why the sky is blue, or what causes illness. See how far that gets you.

"You want to learn how to think? Pick up a tool. If you want to learn what to think, go to school."

What a giant steaming turd of a saying.

[SoCalDem]

4. A few years back I participated in the buy-one-give one program

I wonder if they have one for the tablet now..

Kids are naturally intuitive and are not afraid of trying things ..

[cally]

5. amazing. I would love to see a video showing them opening the boxes

but it's better that from outside the village was there to show them.

[Peace Patriot]

6. Great story! But what's with the link?

I wanted to read more. Clicked on the link. It has just the first couple of sentences, not the full article, not even the parts you cited. Could you provide a link with the full story?

It doesn't surprise me that kids have astonishing ability to use computers. I've seen it with my own eyes. But what does surprise me is that these kids were not only not yet literate themselves, but also they had never even seen a word--meaning that their entire culture and community was illiterate. They had no inculcated value for literacy. They never saw an adult read a sign or a book or any written material, let alone use a computer--or at least no adult in their families, extended families and communities. Maybe they saw a researcher reading or using a computer, or some other random person (visitor, traveler, government agent?) to give them some idea of written language--of what it is, of what it is for.

Another fascinating finding was how quickly the knowledge of how to use a computer spread among the kids. The first adventurous little person opens the box, takes out the strange object and figures out how to turn it on, and "within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day"!

One thing more--with regard to what I will call Gutenberg II, that is, our era transformed by computers comparable to the invention of a movable type printing press that transformed western civilization: I wonder what would have happened if the researchers had dropped a box of books in this village. Maybe they should have done so as a control. I suspect that the kids (or other villagers) would NOT have done the same thing--would NOT have figured out what books are for and how to use them. The difference between a computer and a book is that the computer provides interactive visual clues to its use--and also is a "bright shiny object" in itself and can be visually fun and enticing to any human mind, literate or illiterate. A book needs a teacher. A computer does not. And the most recent computers, of course, are especially designed to be user-friendly and visually interactive. If they'd dropped a box of older computers (no user-friendly interface), some especially bright little future nerd might have figured out what to do with it but that expertise would probably have taken a lot more time to develop and would probably not have spread so quickly or at all.

Lesson: Sophisticated, user-friendly computers and other electronic devices are a plus for literacy not a negative. I have wondered about this, as to texting, for instance. (Is it shortening the thought process? Is it encouraging glib, jargony thinking? It takes time, patience and considerable mental organization to write a letter, for instance--are those skills being lost to texting?) And I know that educators and other thinkers have worried about the impact of electronics on young minds. (What is it doing to critical thinking skills? What is it doing to literacy itself?). This MIT experiment seems to point the other way--that computers can actually entice people to literacy in ways that books cannot. And, after thinking a bit about texting, I realized that it's never bad for millions of people to be communicating in a new way. They will re-invent language. They are re-inventing it. And they will make their own rules about language and about the thinking process itself--just as surely as Shakespeare and the Elizabethans re-invented the English language and discovered and conveyed the humanistic values of the Renaissance on the stage, first among themselves (to all classes), then to the entire western world. Play is good. That is the lesson.

We lost something with Gutenberg. We lost the ability to memorize our knowledge. But we gained hugely in the numbers of people who were able to be exposed to knowledge--by finding a new way to convey it (books). What have we lost with electronics? Handwriting? Slow, meditative thinking? The carefully crafted use of language? And what have we gained? Speed and numbers: the numbers of people communicating and the speed (near instancy) of their communications, which are as often written words as they are photos, vids and other images. We may not recognize those words as "Hamlet" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream" but one day they will be--or, rather, there will be something comparable--a re-invention of language and thought that we can't even imagine at this point.

[Posteritatis]

9. Here's a couple links:

Not sure how static the OP's link was, since I could swear it looked different when I saw it earlier.

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/

http://mashable.com/2012/10/29/tablets-ethiopian-children/

[csziggy]

10. On the link originally supplied, there is a "Next" link

At the bottom right that takes you to the next sentence or so of the article.

At the top left of the page is a link "Switch to Regular DVICE site" which takes you to a regular article page. The direct link to that page seems to be http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

[jackbenimble]

8. Wow, kids are intelligent and capable of learning if we'd just get out of their way.

The ability to learn is often hampered by what and how adults insist kids learn. Great story.