Ethiopian kids hack tablets in 5 months with no instruction

[Fbac]

aha clever..

[weedlefruit]

As someone who helps people use their gadgets over the phone day in day out, I can only hope for a day when my idiot customers start to learn something for themselves......

I have people who own 5 or 6 different laptops they have been convinced to buy, more than 1 tablet and a wireless printer. They use all of those devices to read and print emails and don't have a clue how to do anything more than that. I wish in 5 months they could be proficient enough to actually know what a "browser" is, let alone hack the software.........

[alphacat]

its remarkable because despite never having experience with technology like this, they managed to learn enough independently in order to do something like that. obviously the whole "omg they hacked it" thing dominates the headline, but the really important thing is that there's immense potential for educating kids with nothing more than a relatively low-cost device. you don't need a school, you don't even need a teacher.

Plus the fact that they - and their entire cultural context - were completely devoid of written language when these kids started.

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero.

[test_recordings]

Humans learning capacity is innate, though we have the advantage of language; even if you don`t know something you can learn it because it`s just acquiring awareness of the concept. Best thing I`ve ever been told about how to teach English is that people already know the concept, they just need to learn the extra word.

[alphacat]

Yep. Kind of correlates to Chomsky's theory of natural language.

[Hedley King]

Why didn't they sell them on? And how do they get internet connections? Why download English language apps when they don't speak English? Call me a cynic but this looks a bit like advertising.

[alphacat]

Why didn't they sell them on? And how do they get internet connections? Why download English language apps when they don't speak English? Call me a cynic but this looks a bit like advertising.

OLPC is not a corporate-sponsored effort. Branding is not really the point so far as I can tell since they have no explicit connections to any tech giants; the mention of specific hardware details is just there for the inevitable "what are they using" questions.

read: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators

I'm not sure about their network capabilities; it sounds like much of it was pre-loaded in some way.

More...

The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with 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 out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
...
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.”

[fractal]

tbh hacking anything android is incredibly easy. you don't need to know anything other than how to use google.

big up those kids tho

[alphacat]

tbh hacking anything android is incredibly easy. you don't need to know anything other than how to use google.

big up those kids tho

There is also the issue of learning to read, then learning enough English (written & spoken) to then go on and learn to fiddle with Android... all in 5 months.

[fractal]

yeah, but what else are they going to do? go to the mall? watch tv? Sure, learning is easy when you are hungry and have nothing to do but swat flies off of you... bet you now they are all adicted to porn and the learning has slowed considerably

also, you are assumning that they needed to learn english in order to "change their settings" when they could have just googled a few keywords and followed the video. i changed my spark plugs without knowing much about them and just googling the word spark plug and the words that were pasted on my car. bet i could do it in french in five months as well

[Phase Down]

^ what a comparison.. you learning how to change spark plugs and Ethiopian using and changing a device they never used while not being able to read or write

[E-F]

^ what a comparison.. you learning how to change spark plugs and Ethiopian using and changing a device they never used while not being able to read or write

stop discriminating on the basis of race

[wobbles]

motherfucker i rooted my android on day 1

[idontreallygiveashit]

any chance they "hacked" the tablets by just pressing random shit?

[parson]

it's not just about how smart or not smart the ethiopians are. it's about how the education isn't based on strict curriculum, but is intuitive and lets them teach themselves

[Hedley King]

Why didn't they sell them on? And how do they get internet connections? Why download English language apps when they don't speak English? Call me a cynic but this looks a bit like advertising.

OLPC is not a corporate-sponsored effort. Branding is not really the point so far as I can tell since they have no explicit connections to any tech giants; the mention of specific hardware details is just there for the inevitable "what are they using" questions.

read: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators

I'm not sure about their network capabilities; it sounds like much of it was pre-loaded in some way.

More...

The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with 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 out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
...
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.”

ah right, yeah that makes sense, i'm probably just too cynical

[alphacat]

More:

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses



pretty cool.

[nowaysj]

I think about this story weekly.

Was hoping that you weren't going to post, "Ethiopian kids involved in child pornography ring started by scientific tablet study."