Keller received enthusiastic approval from the minister of education to hand out the English-only devices

It was about eight months ago when a groundbreaking experiment by Cambridge nonprofit One Laptop Per Child brought Matt Keller to the remote village of Wonchi, Ethiopia. There, he had to identify 20 children who would receive a Motorola Xoom tablet.Among them was a boy who didn’t make eye contact. Kelebasa, 8, was withdrawn and disengaged, but when Keller handed him the tablet, Kelebasa soon found the “on” button. He raised his hands in the air and yelled “I am a lion!”Less than a year later, the children — who had never seen a printed word, let alone electricity — have become adept at using dozens of apps, all without instruction. They can identify symbols and sounds, paint and play games with letters and numbers.“It took the kids about 20 minutes to figure it out,” said Keller, vice president of One Laptop, who returns every six weeks to Ethiopia to chart the progress. “The kids self-congregate. They teach each other.”A solar charging station powers the devices. To track the children’s progress, One Laptop swaps out SIM cards. One interesting finding: the kids actually hacked the software, circumventing settings to customize their desktops and enable cameras that were previously disabled.The tablets mark a shift for the famed One Laptop Per Child program, which has distributed 2.5 million of its low-cost, rugged laptops to children in 40 countries since 2005. In Ethiopia, Keller received enthusiastic approval from the minister of education to hand out the English-only devices.“His response was that this is what they want,” Keller said. “English is the aspirational language.”To prepare for the project, Keller went from mud hut to mud hut interviewing parents and children through a translator in the villages. One is Wonchi, a subsistence farming enclave on the edge of an 11,000-foot cliff. The other is Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley, where dust and flies cover you.Keller estimates the kids, ages 4 to 11, have reached kindergarten levels of learning and are on the edge of literacy. The program has raised an important question: Do we underestimate the ability of kids to learn on their own?“Think about when a kid in the U.S. doesn’t read or learn at the level of his or her peers. By and large, those kids never catch up,” Keller said. “We start to view tablets as a way for kids to catch up, learn on their own time and at their own speed. Maybe with the help of their friends.”

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