Poor, unschooled kids learn to 'hack' tablet PCs in ambitious experiment

An experiment to have poor Ethiopian children learn using tablet computers is reaping "encouraging" results: not only are they learning from lessons preloaded in the tablets, some have even learned to hack the tablets themselves.

 

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation said the experiment, if successful, could benefit some 100 million first-grade-aged children who lack access to schools.

 

“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,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said in an article in MIT's Technology Review.

 

Negroponte said this was considering OLPC workers had dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, with the boxes taped shut and with no instruction. 

 

Each Motorola tablet ran Google's Android operating system, and contained preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, and paintings.

 

Negroponte said that despite the lack of instructions, the children learned by themselves to operate the tablet, and even enabled the tablet's disabled camera.

 

“Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android,” he said.

 

Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said the children actually managed to get around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings - something he found encouraging.

 

“The kids had completely customized the desktop — so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that ... 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,” McNierney said.

 

“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn,” Negroponte added.

 

OLPC is trying the new approach in two remote Ethiopian villages, by simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.

 

Learning program

 

The tablets in the experiment are Motorola Xoom tablets using a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use.

 

Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps the memory cards so researchers can study how the machines were actually used.

 

Technology Review said that after several months, children in both villages were still "heavily engaged" in using and recharging the machines.

 

Also, they were observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words.

 

One boy who was exposed to literacy games with animal pictures even opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”

 

Involved in the experiment are Wonchi and Wolonchete, two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa.

 

Negroponte said the children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them.

 

Too early

 

Despite the encouraging early results, Negroponte said it would take more time to see if the children can learn this way.

 

“If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” he said.

 

“We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start,” he added.

 

New approach

 

Dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is a new approach for OLPC.

 

Through the late 2000s, OLPC was focused on delivering a custom ruggedized laptop, the XO, three million of which have been distributed to children in 40 countries.

 

Yet, giving computers directly to poor children without any instruction is even more ambitious.

 

“What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school? Can we give them tool to read and learn—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?” McNierney said. — TJD, GMA News