OpenRoad + Mod7
Two pioneering organizations, together at last.
OpenRoad is pleased to announce the acquisition of creative agency Mod7.
Read the letter from our PrincipalChild, teach thyself
Posted on November 05, 2012 in Design by Mod7
Without any training or instruction, illiterate kids in Ethiopia who have never even seen a computer learn to operate and even hack a tablet within weeks.
This is really fascinating. One Laptop Per Child, the incredibly-ambitious initiative to empower poor children through technology, has shared the results of an experiment on children's ability to learn and adapt. So far, the experiment lead to only anecdotal evidence, but the results are encouraging, if not delightful.
The article has more information, but here are the salient points:
- The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
- OLPC dropped off closed boxes containing tablets, taped shut, with no instruction.
- Negroponte: “ 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... Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android. ”
More can be found on an OLPC blog post.