14 DAY TRIAL // An experiment set up by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has shown some interesting results. The goal of the experiment was to see whether illiterate children could learn to read on their own with the aid of tablets on which all sorts of educational applications had been installed.
The Motorola Xoom tablets were handed out to children from remote Ethiopian villages.
According to MIT’s Technology Review, the youths have not only managed to learn, but they have also managed to bypass some restrictions set in place by OLPC representatives.
Within four minutes after receiving the tablets, one of the kids opened the box and managed to power up the device.
In the first five days, they were already using several of the applications.
Within five months, they figured out that there was more to the device than running the educational apps, so they managed to enable the camera, which was initially disabled by OLPC.
Furthermore, they even managed to customize the desktop, despite the fact that desktop settings had been frozen.