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NEWS: India's slum and village kids teach themselves computers
India's slum and village kids teach themselves how to use computers
By Rezaul H. Laskar, Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, Aug 12 (IANS) A unique experiment conducted over the past
three years has seen children in Indian fishing villages and slums
learning the basics of computing by themselves.
Researchers behind the project believe it can provide an alternative
means of primary education in a country, which is one of the world
leaders in information technology but where an overwhelming majority
of children aged between 6 and 14 years cannot even attend school.
The man behind the scheme, Sugata Mitra, head of research and
development for the New Delhi-based computer education company NIIT
Ltd., calls it "minimally invasive education".
Others describe it as the "hole-in-the-wall" experiment -- a
reference to the researchers' decision to place computers hooked up
to the Internet in openings in brick walls in public spaces for
children to use without any supervision.
The scheme began on January 26, 1999, with a single computer
installed in a wall outside NIIT's headquarters in the south Delhi
neighbourhood of Kalkaji. Within days, children from nearby slums,
most of them with no knowledge of English, were using the computer to
paint and to regularly log on to the MTV Web site.
"This is turning out to be a lot bigger than we thought it would be,"
Mitra told IANS.
"Children were able to learn to use computers and the Internet on
their own, irrespective of their social, cultural or economic
backgrounds," said Mitra.
Some 40 computers installed by the researchers in Shivpuri in Madhya
Pradesh, Madantusi in Uttar Pradesh and fishing villages in
Maharashtra's Sindhudurg district have produced similar results.
This despite the fact that there was almost no computer usage in
Shivpuri and the people of Madantusi, 60 km from state capital
Lucknow, had never even seen a personal computer.
While children learnt basic operations for browsing the Web and
drawing within a few days, adults did not make any attempt to learn
how to use the hole-in-the-wall computers. About 30 percent of the
users were girls.
Children formed impromptu classes to teach one another and invented
their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer.
For example, some referred to the cursor as a 'sui,' Hindi for
needle, while the hourglass that appears onscreen when a computer is
busy became the 'damru,' after Hindu god Shiva's hourglass-shaped
drum. Web sites were referred to as "channels".
Painting and games were favourites with younger children, while those
aged 12 to 13 read newspapers, browsed cinema sites and occasionally
accessed educational material.
In Sindhudurg, a teacher reported that about 10 percent the
curriculum in computing concepts was completed by the children in one
month without his assistance.
Mitra and the other researchers have discreetly monitored the
experiment, filming the children with video cameras.
He now believes the experiment could be used to allow groups of
children to achieve some of the objectives of primary education with
"minimal intervention" by adults.
"I think this is the most fulfilling part of the experiment -- that
the kids are teaching themselves lots of other things besides simply
using the computer," he said.
The next phase of the experiment will see the researchers taking it
to other parts of India over a three-year period. They plan to design
computer kiosks that can operate outdoors in tropical climates and
provide wireless connectivity to the Internet in areas that have no
access to the Web.
--Indo-Asian News Service
