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Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

Green Balls

Green Balls

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I haven't seen this posted here yet. A refreshing break from politics...

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English.
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"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."
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This is absolutely fascinating to me. It reminds me of hacking into my teacher's computer in High School in the late '80s in my computer skills class. I had absolutely no knowledge of computers (we were using Macintosh computers). After 2 weeks of classes, I had his system hacked in less than 1 hour when I made the attempt.

Kids can learn quickly.
 
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