Teaching kids computers

[layla]

Here’s a cool article: Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves.  (My favorite quote: “… within five months, they had hacked Android.”)

Along similar lines, a physicist in India put a computer with a high-speed internet in a New Delhi slum to see what would happen and got similar results: kids who quickly figured out how to use the computer and the Internet by poking everything just to see what would happen.

Children’s boundless curiosity and ability to learn is so amazing to me, and I think it’s deeply unfortunate that we basically are trained out of this as we grow up, and learn to think in terms of getting particular results and not looking silly, rather than trying new things just to see what will happen, and learning a ton of new stuff in the process.

Another nifty thing, from the second article:

I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”

It’s an amazing world we live in.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.