This experiment is 10 years old and ongoing. It is directed by Professor Mitra of Newcastle University and Delhi. In India in 1999 Mitra and his researchers installed computers in ‘holes in the wall’ in villages where literacy levels were low, underprivilege was the norm and nobody had ever encountered a computer.

Curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine and were delighted when they were told that it belonged to them. Within minutes the children figured out how to point and click.

Initially the stronger boys and maybe the bullies of the community dominated the space in front of the computers. But they soon got bored and eventually the natural geeks emerged.

They worked out how to use the Paint program to make pictures – and more amazingly learned how to save the pictures that they created. By the end of the day they were browsing and within a week were regularly logging on to the MTV website. Within a month of interaction, children were able to discover and use features such as new folder creation, cutting and pasting, shortcuts, moving/resizing windows and using MS Word to create short messages even without a keyboard.

All this in villages with no television and the nearest telephone a few miles away (it was 1999 remember). Also the computer interface was in English – a language unknown to these children.

Children were able to learn to use computers and the Internet on their own, irrespective of their social, cultural or economic backgrounds. Adults on the other hand did not make any attempt to learn how to use the hole-in-the-wall computers but were delighted that their children had this opportunity.

At first only about 30 percent of the users were girls but then the researchers said to all the children that the computer was for girls and boys alike. The girls proved to be as enthusiastic and as adept at computing as the boys. A big plus for getting the girls involved was they organised the use of the computer setting a timetable for use and a rota of names.

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.

This is how the children taught each other in computer usage:

One child made an accidental discovery eg : they find that the cursor changes to a hand shape at certain places on the screen. Several children repeated the discovery for themselves by requesting the first child to let them do so. Then more accidental or incidental discoveries are made as a result of the first. All the children repeated all the discoveries made and, in the process, make more discoveries and started to create a vocabulary to describe their experience.

The vocabulary encouraged them to perceive generalisations (“when you right click on a hand shaped cursor, it changes to the hourglass shape for a while and a new page comes up”). They memorised entire procedures for doing something, for example, how to open a painting program and retrieve a saved picture. They taught each other shorter procedures for doing the same thing, whenever one of them found a new, shorter, procedure.

The groups in each village naturally divided itself into the “knows” and the “know nots.” It was realised that a child that knows something new would part with that knowledge in return for friendship and exchange as opposed to ownership of physical things where they could use force to get what they did not have.

A stage was reached by most groups of village children when no further discoveries were made and the children occupied themselves with practising what they had already learned. At this point the researchers introduced a new “seed” discovery eg : “did you know that computers can play music? Here let me play a song for you” – but without showing the children how it was done. Usually, a spiral of discoveries followed and another self instructional cycle began.

It is much more amazing than I can make it sound. For more information : a 15 page paper about the genesis of the experiment and a discussion which was written in 2001. The second is a 20 minute video of Professor Mitra in 2007 discussing the ongoing results, implications and applications of this experiment.

This experiment inspired the Oscar Winning "Slumdog Millionaire"