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| Sunday, 26 March 2006 |
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Junior Observer |  |
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Information at every nook and cranny The year 1987 was probably among the most memorable for Dr. Sugata Mitra. His six-year-old son promised not to touch Mitra's new PC with a 10 megabyte drive, but had a simple request - could he watch when it was being used? A month later, when the search for a lost spreadsheet was proving difficult, his son explained, "If you do dir/w, all the files will show side by side as well." Dr. Sugata Mitra is chief scientist with NIIT, New Delhi.
Six months later, his son was playing complex computer games and operating DOS in ways Mitra never thought possible. This formed the basis of Mitra's paper for the annual conference of the All India Association for Educational Technology where he argued that we should just give PCs to kids and let them figure it out. In 1999, Mitra's friend, Vivek, had a computer sunk into a wall near their office in Kalkaji, New Delhi, keeping the screen visible on the other side. A touch pad was built into the wall. A few hours later, children from the nearby slums were surfing the net. Says Mitra about the hole in the wall experiments, "The children took just six months to learn mouse operations, basics of programmes, surfing and downloading stuff. They had even coined their own terms. The mouse cursor was the 'sui' or 'teer' while the hourglass symbol was the 'damru'." The experiment was repeated in Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh and in the village of Madantusi in Utra Pradesh. Both proved that six to 13-year-olds do not need to be 'taught' to use computers. Commenting on this Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) technique, Mitra says, "Sometimes, one child already knows a little about computers and shows off his skills. Random explorations lead to accidental discoveries. Children repeat them. All the children repeat the discoveries made and, in the process, make more discoveries and create a vocabulary to describe their experiences. They commit to memory entire procedures for opening painting programs and retrieving saved files. They teach each other through discussions and make their own timetables to learn." The social benefits cannot be ignored. Mitra observes, "Often they divide themselves into those who know and those who don't. A child that knows will part with that knowledge for friendship. Adults in the slum say that as the kids are occupied, they will not get involved with petty crime." When no further discoveries can be made, the children practise what they have already learned. "Now it is important to introduce a new 'seed' discovery "Did you know that computers can play music? This usually sets in motion another self-instructional cycle," he says. Mitra's guidelines for achieving the same results in schools are simple. The machine should be installed outdoors in a public and safe location. Locating computers even inside a school is associated with control, studying and other negatives. Keeping it in the playground is ideal. The MIE process depends on exploration and discovery, so group work is essential. Children teach each other effectively and capably, self-regulating the process. The function of the system and internet must be reliable. The Government of India awarded Dr. Mitra the Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology - 2005.Mitra believes, "India is a good laboratory for testing, if computers can survive outdoors, built into walls and buildings. We have all the varied global weather conditions. It is a good laboratory for finding out if children internationally would respond the same way to a computer set in a wall. We have all the diversity of children possible - economic, social, genetic, cultural, physical. You name it. We have it." - The Hindu Young World
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