MIT Delivers 1000 Tablets to Ethiopian Children

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:56:49 -0400

MIT's One Laptop per Child Program (OLPC) decided to deliver boxes of tablets to two illiterate villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

(from dvice.com)

"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." - OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference

Check out the rest of the story and let us know what you think! Are kids in developed areas of the world today getting less and less inquisitive?