Two isolated, rural Ethiopian villages who have never seen road signs or printed material have been visited by alien technology. Taped shut boxes were dropped off in these villages, giving no instructions. The children of these villages quickly discovered the contents of these boxes to be tablet computers equipped with a solar charging system. With no prior knowledge they found the on-off switch, and each were using 47 apps daily within 5 days. The One Laptop Per Student program provided the tablets as part of an observational experiment. The goal? To see if illiterate kids with no exposure to writing could learn to read on their own by playing with multiple medias of preloaded educational programs on the tablet. The results were better than expected from the 40 1st grade aged children. Within two weeks, they were singing their ABC's in the villages,. Within 5 months they had hacked Android, figuring out how to change the frozen desktop settings.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/29/tablets-ethiopian-children/
No comments:
Post a Comment