Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction
“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.”
That is such a great story.
Heart-warming and optimistic – great story
1957 Sputnik hinted nukes dropped from “the high ground.” The 1958 National Defense Education Act rebirthed public school K-12 into prodigy factories with standardized testing quality assurance. Advocates of those who took rather than produced were offended.
President Johnson’s 1965 “Great Society” jackbooted State compassion-imposed social promotion upon the meanest underachievers. Obscenely expensive, intensively studied, socially engineered American zero-goal education transforms pre-school minds into crapsicles by third grade. Diversity! Those who can must never do, for no child may not be left behind.
In one generation Google may have a custom-built Ethiopian cohort. Genius is where you found it, as are cluelessness and vile abuse of privilege celebrating malicious infliction of reign.