TED Talk: The child-driven education

Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment.

If you’ve never watched a TED Talk, you’re missing out on some very inspirational and innovative thought leaders tell the stories of their research and experiences all over the world.  I watched this one over the weekend and decided it greatly relates to the mission Vort Port is currently taking part in.

The speaker is Sugata Mitra, and he spends a few minutes talking about the educational effect that computers have on children. His research is simple: put computers in front of children and see what happens. In a lot of the cases, the children have never had the opportunity to handle a computer before, but they still learn within minutes to play games, look information up, and thus, become empowered. There are some very interesting results to Sugata’s studies. But enough from me! Watch it:

This is the very reason we’re trying to bring computer labs to rural villages in India. IT is a very big industry in India, but still the people int he smaller villages have never touched a computer. By providing a solar-powered computer lab, we’re giving these small villages a chance to compete for the IT jobs in the bigger cities, thus improving their own and their families lives.