The experiment:
Closed boxes with Motorola Xoom tablets with solar chargers and custom software were left in two isolated villages in Ethiopia. Some adults were taught how to recharge the batteries and nothing else. They didn't have instruction manuals or anything (very few people at the village knew how to read anyway). The devices had special software that tracked how they were used.
The result:
Quote from: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/"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."
Elaborating later on Negroponte's hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC's chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC's effort to freeze desktop settings. "The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids' tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that," McNierney said. "And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning."
Quote from: http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.phpThis 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.
I've been told that one of the reasons OLPC isn't implemented in the schools in my area is not that the laptops are expensive or anything, but that the teachers don't want to learn how to use them. This experiment suggests that the teachers can be unnecessary.
Also, how did you guys learn how to use computers? Did you guys read instruction manuals and stuff?