Little hackers
Don't tell the FBI....
One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte has said children are not only teaching themselves to read without teachers by using fondleslabs he provided, but they are learning how to hack Android as well. In an experiment, the OLPC dropped off Motorola Xoom tablets with solar chargers in two Ethiopian villages and trained …
1 - Technological tools are wonderful and can be used for noble purposes, like education.
2 - Some kids are still kids (not miniature of adults), even though their tools are different nowadays.
3 - We can improve the lives of everyone in this planet with some good will, technology and guidance.
Of course politicians are not interested in any of this. Anywhere.
I've seen the ted.com lecture on how curiosity can lead to learning and that I can believe. However, this article gives the impression that the kids rooted the device and dropped their own app on the system after downloading a dev system programming it and installing is that really what happened - now that would be amazing!
Many years ago a friend who worked in a junior school (what is that - 6 -11 years old??) showed me what some kid(s) had done. Delete all icons on the windows desktop after screen grabbing the desktop and setting the screen grab as the background so no icons were clickable - pure genius or psycopath mother \ father. Yep I know they shouldn't have been able to do that, blah blah but way back and nothing to do with me guv! If I had met the kid that did that then definitely recommend to Microsoft Software engineers as a child prodigy - some technical knowledge + understanding of innate human belief system ;)
Most likely they didnt lock the systems down properly
reminds me of when i was at college and the library computers ran windows 3.11 which had 3rd party software installed to keep them secure including locking down the run command, of course it didnt take long to figure out that all that you needed to do was to alt-tab to the security software and press alt-f4 to shut it down!!
Oh the first time I got to use a Mac GUI back in the days when hdds needed to be parked and other fun things. The professor had said to drag the floppy to the trash to unmount it so naturally I assumed you performed the same action for umounting and parking the hard drive. When the screen went black I thought it was terribly convenient Apple had assumed I wanted to shut down at the same time and automatically did it. Needless to say it took the a while to figure out why it wouldn't start for the morning class. Ah the good old days when computers were, oh what's the word they bandy about for GUIs nowadays? Oh yes, intuitive that's it.
I had an acquaintance who did essentially the same thing the first time he saw a Mac. It was at a computer store, and a sales rep said "Play with it - it's intuitive and you won't break anything!" A minute later something important was in the trash and the system was woefully confused.
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FTFA :- "I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch ... powered it up," Negroponte told MIT Review.
Sound patronisingly racist to me, as are many third world do-gooders. Did he assume that black kids were incapable of opening a box?
I bet those kids will do even better than open boxes and change wallpaper -- stand by for an avalanche of Nigerian^H^H^H^H^H^H Ethiopian scams in 10 years time, or sooner.
...I wondered. Until I got to Wikipedia's article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ethiopia), and found there's no such language as ``Ethiopian''. The official language, Amharic, is spoken by about 30% of the citizens. Oromo is the most widely spoken, at around 34% and there are some 75 (90?) others in use. English is the language of secondary education, and the most-used foreign language.
I guess English was a reasonable choice.