The place I go to school is doing an NSF-funded project that is exploring the role of kids as design partners (they are currently looking at the International Children's Digital Library).

While reviewing this site during class, I remembered an entry that Christina blogged long ago, about the hole in the wall project in India that exposed poor urban kids to a PC for the first time:

Sugata ... Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."

To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. ...

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

Too bad this effect doesn't carry over as one ages!

08:26 PM | linkme | home