TED: Kids teach themselves - awesome project called hole in the wall

A guy called Sugata Mitra tackles the problem of bad, or non-existent teachers in area with extreme poverty.

The test areas has a population of kids that don't know English, and the kids are mostly 100% illiterate and have never
seen or used a computer.

What he did was install a pretty nice PC in a hole in a wall connected with a touch-pad so it couldn't be stolen or damaged and just left it there without a word about it.

Random kid walks up, messes around with the touch pad and figures out how to browse the Internet in about 5-8 minutes. A couple days later tons of other kids are there teaching each other how to browse. They didn't know a lick of English, most couldn't even read.

3 months later without any supervision they have fucking installed games, are playing them, knows what a processor is because the current one was apparently to slow (lol) and they also wanted a better mouse, they are saving files, loading them again etc.. No teachers, no-one taught them shit, and they now had a roughly 200 word English vocabulary because they needed that to work the Internet and games.

The same amount of skills that they taught themselves would have taken several years of classes, all for the price of a PC and Internet connection.

This is seriously amazing, watch it!

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_the...