New tack for OLPC: Let the students teach themselves

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138997-new-tack-for-olpc-let-the-students-teach-themselves

After delivering laptops to poor schools around the world (mostly in third world countries) in order to improve education, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization is trying something completely different: student self-learning.
OLPC decided to conduct an experiment. The organization picked two Ethiopian villages and dropped off Motorola Xoom tablets with locked-down software (that disabled the camera and froze the home screen settings) to the children there. The interesting part is that the workers gave absolutely no instructions on what to do with them. The boxes containing the tablets were still taped up when they got there.
Conventional wisdom says that the children would just play with the boxes and then get bored. That’s not what happened. Instead, the children opened boxes and then figured out how to switch on the tablets. And that was within four minutes of receiving the shipment.
Within a week, the children had completely figured out how to use the tablets and were using apps like crazy, up to 47 a day. Within two weeks, the children were learning the alphabet and the written word. Within five months, they hacked Android to bypass the camera restriction and customize the home screens!

OLPC’s Xoom tablet

While these are promising results that show that children can learn and be creative on their own, conclusive findings will require more experiments over a multi-year period. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte stated that if it gets funded the organization would have to start over in another village to redo the experiment and observe for another “year and a half to two years.”
This is not the first time Negroponte has talked about this idea. Last year, he mentioned that some computers would be airdropped to children with no instructions whatsoever. This appears to be what he was talking about then, though apparently the Xooms were not airdropped.
This is an exciting development in education experimentation. However, we often forget that children are very capable absorbing information. Children are mentally flexible and learning-by-doing is how humans are supposed to be educated, after all. Indeed, the scientific method is simply a codified version of that for the purposes of research. While the first world has largely switched to instructional learning, developing nations still have huge swathes of children not taught in this manner.
If nothing else, this will be a very interesting experiment to follow, because it may result in some surprising conclusions that will improve education around the world.