The Hole in the Wall experiment found that slum kids in India used the internet to teach each other all sorts of computer skills, all by themselves.

Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University. He devised the Hole in the Wall experiment, where a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use, whenever and however they liked. He aimed to prove that young people could learn to use computers easily without any formal training. He also introduced kids in India to the Granny Cloud – a network of people like grandparents and other family members who are not trained teachers but who can give common sense advice to children to help them learn.

The Hole in the Wall experiment

On 26 January 1999, Professor Mitra’s team devised their hole in the wall experiment by knocking through the wall separating the NIIT – an Indian management training company – from the next-door slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. A specially designed, freely accessible computer was placed in the hole in the wall.

The computer was placed three feet off the ground and a shade was put on top, so tall people (adults!) hit their heads on it. A protective plastic cover was put over the keyboard which had an opening that only small hands could fit into. Low seating was put in front of the computer, close to the wall to make it difficult for an adult to sit on. The whole thing was painted in bright colours and a sign saying ‘For children under 15′ was put up. These design factors stopped most adults from using the computer.

This child-friendly computer proved to be really popular among the slum children who learned to use it on their own with no adult help, which prompted Professor Mitra to propose the following idea: that learning basic computing skills can be achieved by any set of children through incidental learning – learning by doing and experimenting – as long as the learners are given access to a suitable computer with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance.

Results of the Hole in the Wall experiment

If a group of children are given free and public access to computers and the internet, Professor Mitra found that even if they have never used a computer before, they can:

• Become computer literate on their own, i.e. they can teach themselves to use computers and the internet to do the same kinds of tasks adults use it for.

• Teach themselves enough English to use email, chat and search engines.

• Learn to search the internet for answers to questions, after just a few months.

• Improve their English pronunciation on their own.

• Improve their mathematics and science scores in school.

• Answer examination questions for children who are several years older than them.

• Change and improve their social skills and personal values.

• Form their own, independent opinions and work out whether an idea is good or bad.

Within days, the children browsing the internet, cutting and pasting, dragging and dropping and creating folders. The children liked to draw, discovering how to use the Microsoft Paint programme to create pictures. Then they moved on to downloading and playing games. By the second month they had discovered MP3 music files and were downloading songs.

How the Hole in the Wall experiment led to the Granny Cloud

Professor Mitra noticed that the children did best when an adult was present offering advice and encouragement over their shoulders. He worked out that someone who is not a trained teacher, like a granny (or a grandad or an auntie or an uncle!) can naturally help children to ask the right questions and learn through play. And so the idea of the Granny Cloud was born – the official name of the project is Sole (self-organised learning environments).

There are now many hundreds of grannies, or e-mediators as they are officially known, who help kids to learn all over the world. They are not teachers and the sessions they conduct with the children in India are not lessons. Instead they read stories to the children and talk about things relevant to them like their families, their gardens or what they’re cooking for dinner. The point is that they provide encouragement and praise and are ‘virtual grannies’ to the children.