Commissioned Paper: The “Hole in the wall” experiments - Self-organizing systems for gender parity in primary education

Groups of children can learn to use computers on their own, irrespective of who or where they are.

Groups of children, given access to shared, publicly accessible computers in playgrounds and other public areas, will teach themselves to use the technology on their own.

The original “hole in the wall”, January 1999, Kalkaji, New Delhi, India

This was unknown prior to 1999, when it was discovered through a set of experiments conducted by NIIT Limited, an education and training multinational with its headquarters in New Delhi, India.

Through what is arguably the largest experiment in primary education in recent times, Sugata Mitra of NIIT went on to discover that the “playground” computers he had invented would:

1. Produce computer literacy

2. Improve math and English scores

3. Change social values

4. Improve school attendance

5. Reduce school dropout rates

6. Reduce petty crime

7. Generate local goodwill

8. Benefit boys and girls equally

Through five years of rigorous measurements across the Indian subcontinent, his results were verified amongst 40,000 of the world’s poorest children. Almost half of these were girls.

These results have been documented exhaustively in the most journals and media in the world.

Over 40,000 references to this work are found on the Internet on the google search engine.

Without adult intervention or supervision, 40,000 village children experimented with computers and software to acquire an enduring understanding of the information age.

The Concept

Minimally Invasive Education (MIE), as this method is sometimes referred to, is composed of several innovations in hardware technology, software technology, and cognitive design. It is one of the first attempts at applying the principle of self-organising systems to children’s education. Self-organising systems are usually studied in the context of Physics and Mathematics and this attempt, arguably, represents the first in the social sciences.

Minimally Invasive Education

Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) is new educational technology for achieving mass computer literacy, and some basic primary education at a cost that is considerably lower than traditional alternatives. It employs learning models such as collaborative constructivism and a series of interlocking innovations, both technological and pedagogical. Computers are made available in shared, public spaces, free of charge and no structure is imposed on when, how or what children learn.

How it Works

Shared outdoor public computers, incorporating self-protective hardware and software are combined with voluntary group self-learning by all the children of a given community, whether in or out of school. In five or six years’ time, the oldest of these children, now 13 or 14, will be the first computer-literate adult generation of their communities.

• The computers, typically located in a government school playground or in similar safe, public areas, are unsupervised and are available to the children at least eight hours a day.

• Working in self-organized groups and helping each other, the children typically navigate within minutes and begin to browse in about an hour. Within three months they achieve basic computer literacy, and by nine months have achieved the proficiency level equivalent to the skills of most modern office workers. They also pick up a considerable amount of the English language from common multimedia software.

• Educational and other games and content tested with other children of the same age group provides the “minimally invasive” educational input that causes change in educational outcomes.

• Several types of school-related content and links are also provided to help with schoolwork. Teachers have been very positive about MIE because of the children’s increased interest in learning, higher enrollments, and educational games that take care of rote learning, allowing them to concentrate on higher level tasks like mentoring students  and leading class discussions. 

It is important to mention here that these results are obtained when the computers are placed in a safe, public location, such as a playground. The same computers, when placed in a room inside the school do not produce the same results. The children do not perceive computers in schools as their property and playthings. They suspect some hidden agenda and are afraid of some “catch” in using them. Girls tend to avoid going into closed rooms with boys, unless there is some adult supervisor.

In most outdoor locations, the number of girls and boys are about equal. However, there are some locations, particularly in slums and very poor areas, where there are very few girl users. Ensuring and perceiving safety is important for attracting girls to public computers.

While the girls learn as quickly as the boys, their activity patterns tend to be different. Girls are more practical, they will learn those things that they can use immediately. While boys will experiment, for example, with a lasso (irregular cutting) tool in a painting program, girls will wait until the boys have learnt the tool, then learn it from them and begin using the tool immediately to create drawings.

While both boys and girls use games as the most frequent application, the type of games played differ with both age and gender.

Very young boys and girls play the same games. These are usually simple clicking games such as catching a ball with a net, or playing a sound by clicking on a picture.

In children over 10, boys tend to concentrate on “action” oriented games such as racing and pinball, while girls seem to be interested in more conceptual games. Girls would play chess or games with arithmetic more than boys.

Girls over 15 years old seldom come to the computers, possibly because of parental control.

However, in those areas where older girls are able to use the computer, their usage patterns tend to be somewhat different from that of boys. While boys of 15 years and above tend to browse the Internet and search for things using, for example, “google”, the girls tend to use e-mail and chat forums more. Once, they are used to the Internet, girls also tend to use the computer to complete their school work.

Research and Evaluation

Minimally Invasive Education has been evaluated during three years of research and pilot testing with nearly 40,000 children in India, Cambodia, and South Africa. In South Africa, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research undertook two independent replications of Minimally Invasive Education, one in a Pretoria slum, and the second in the village of Cwili near the city of East London. In spite of the differences in culture and native language, their results were virtually identical to those obtained at the 32 test sites across India, as well as at sites in other countries.

Impact

About 40,000 in-school and out-of-school children have been directly impacted by MIE in terms of the following research-based outcomes:

• Acquisition of functional computer literacy
• Improvement in academic performance
• Increase in confidence and self-esteem
• Increased collaborative behavior

Apart from data-based findings, there is consistent anecdotal evidence of large-scale impact on school enrollment, retention, concentration, attention span and problem-solving ability.

The low cost of the additional, proprietary MIE hardware and the fact that it makes much more effective use of the computers already owned by schools—200 children can become computer literate using one MIE computer—make it a very effective and affordable multiplier of digital literacy and basic education. Through MIE, even children with little or no access to school gain entry to a world of quality educational content that supports their education and leads to increased confidence and self-esteem.  

Cost of learning (1 US$= Rs. 44, April 2005)

Component Innovations of MIE

The following hardware, software and pedagogical methodologies were developed specifically for Minimally Invasive Education. Some of the devices and software listed below may also have other commercial applications. The component innovations are described further below:

Hardware

A low-cost modular enclosure system, developed in-house, enables mass market desktops with standard keyboards (< USD 400 and falling), laptops, and other computing devices to operate reliably in public outdoor situations and extreme climates; ToBuMouse, a super-tough solid-state mouse, never needs replacement. The Automatic Control System and connected environmental sensor array protect the computers from human mishandling and shut the computers down as soon as environmental conditions beyond their operating tolerance are detected. Some of these are explained as follows:

Kiosk window unit

Based on feedback from the field, certain changes were made in the front panel of each kiosk. It now incorporates the facility to fix a web camera; the way of fixing the front panel to a wall is also changed. All possible external sharp edges are removed so that children can not get hurt while using the kiosk.

TOBU Mouse

The design of the input device provided by the present invention is such that new users find it easier to use and it can be deployed and used in an outdoor, multi-user environment being much more rugged and without any moving parts. The device has three key features:

Ø       There are no moving parts.

Ø       Senses capacitance to detect presence or absence of user’s finger.

Ø       Six discrete metallic touch points to insure intuitive usage (four   buttons are mapped on up, down, left and right directions and remaining two are equivalent of right and left click of a mouse).

This invention is a pointing device. Other conventional input devices are too fragile to be used in a computer deployed for outdoor, public use. Also in many of these devices continuous movement of the device itself is needed to achieve the corresponding movement of the cursor on the screen. The present invention takes care of all these problems.

Environment Sensor

The environment sensor is a sub-system of the Remote Monitoring System for MIE Computer Kiosks. This is a set of PC-interfaced electronic sensors to measure temperature and humidity to monitor thermal conditions and presence of moisture in and around the CPU enclosure.  This helps in ensuring that the kiosk computer is operating under safe ambient conditions. Based on these measurements, the environment sensor is also capable of triggering physical devices such as fans to take corrective action. Under extreme conditions, this device can also initiate shutdown of the CPU in order to protect it. This device is available as an option to kiosk implementers.

MIE Kiosk Controller

Automatically awakens and hibernates the computers on a user-programmable schedule; automatically reboots computers if necessary, shuts down the machines if the environment sensor detects conditions beyond their operating range.

Software

A specially designed portal gives children immediate access to free and low-cost third party educational content that has been top-rated by 40,000 children in three years of MIE research, and also helps them to learn navigation. A Windows “Anti-hang Utility” increases the fault-tolerance of the OS and prevents it from hanging when four or five children use one computer as a group and/or open too many windows. “Safe Desktop”, an automated system administrator, detects system conditions and unauthorized use, takes appropriate action, and notifies the local or remote administrator by e-mail or cell phone. A Remote Monitoring System (RMS) works with both connected and unconnected computers. In the connected mode, it can provide real time remote presence or be set to sample video, voice, screenshots, applications, Web and system logs at user-selectable intervals. In unconnected mode, it stores the data onto a disk or portable drive for later viewing. The RMS includes a one-click analysis utility that presents the data for any given period in graphic format.

Pedagogy

Minimally Invasive Education was developed by observing and analyzing natural collaborative learning of computer skills among Indian children in 12 ethnically and linguistically different states, from Ladakh to Tamil Nadu, and from Rajasthan to West Bengal. Having isolated the common cross-cultural factors in learning, the researchers then focused on enhancing them in ways that were “minimally invasive”, or largely invisible to the children, such as testing and selecting the most effective content, allowing some children to observe a technician performing a task so that they would later teach the others, and occasionally by developing animated tutorial software in which a cartoon character coaches children through a particularly difficult task, such as signing up for an e-mail account. Throughout, all instruction by adults and older youngsters was rigorously avoided, to prevent the children becoming dependent on scarce and expensive resources. Participating teachers were encouraged to assign tasks to be performed at the computers, and to lead class discussions about computer learning, but were asked to avoid direct instruction.  As a result, “child teachers” emerged at each of the experimental sites—typically, talented 6-8 year old boys and girls who took on the “teacher” role and taught 3 or 4 “generations” of children to use the computers.

The girls of the community tend to act as “linkers” in this collaborative learning process. They connect a potential learner with the correct child who they can learn from. In this manner a network of learners form, where each learner is both a learner and a teacher.

The “hole in the wall” experiments have given us a new, inexpensive and reliable method for bringing computer literacy and primary education to those areas where conventional schools are not functional.

Such facilities are not meant to replace schools and teachers, they are meant to supplement, complement and stand-by for those areas of the earth where good schools and good teachers are, for whatever reason, absent.

“Fallout” projects

The basic results from experiments such as those above have been since used in NIIT to construct several training programs. Amongst them, one of the most successful is a computer literacy program for women called “Jyoti for women”. This program was conducted in 2002 throughout urban India and 40,000 women learned to use computers using a task based, collaborative pedagogy.

In designing this course we used the following observations:

1. Women of different ages use computers differently and for different purposes. The course, therefore, offered a choice of different, equivalent tasks, for each skill to be learned. Learners could choose the task they found most interesting or useful.
2. Girls (8 to 13 years) can be effective teachers for older women.
3. Women learners are motivated to complete a task if they appreciate the practical utility of it.

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A kiosk in village D. Salhundi, Karnataka, India

This note has been prepared by Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist, Center for Research in Cognitive Systems, National Institute of Information Technology Limited (NIIT), New Delhi, India at the request of the Gender and Development Group and Global ICT Department.