Ethiopian Kids Hacked OLPCs in Five Month with zero Instructions

About five months ago, OLPC Project decided to have a little experiment. They chose a village in Ethiopia where the literacy rate was nearly 0% and decided to drop off a bunch of Motorola Xooms there. On the tablets, there was custom software that was meant to teach kids how to read. The kicker is that they gave no instructions. They just dropped the box off at town square and walked away.

 

The devices in use were Motorola Zoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which OLPC workers had taught adults in the village to use. OLPC workers would swap the memory cards in the systems and analyze them to understand what the machines were being used for.

 

  

 

 

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week: "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."   

Timeline of Expirement

Within Four Minutes - One kid had opened the box and had figured out how to turn on the Xoom. within Five Days - The kids were using nearly 50 applications each every day. In Two Weeks - The kids were singing their ABC’s in English. now its 5th Month - They hacked the Motorola Xooms so they could enable the camera, which had been disabled by OLPC.