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1969 My friend Gora takes me to the Odeon in Delhi to see Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". A black monolith is found in Africa and another on the moon. The monoliths seem to do nothing at all. All humanity is desperate to learn more about them. We love puzzles.

1987 I have a PC with a 10 megabyte drive. I spent Rs 50,000 to buy it, nearly a year's salary. My son is six and I need to protect my PC from him. He agrees not to touch it. But can he watch? Sure, I say. Let's see what sense he makes of DOS commands.

A month later, I have lost a spreadsheet file. I search directory after directory scrolling up and down the file lists. A small voice from the back says, "If you do dir/w all the files will show side by side as well". I gulp. "Really?" I say, "Well, you can try it yourself, just be very careful."

Two months later he is playing Moonbugs, Simcity and Flight Simulator. Six months later, he does things with DOS that I never thought were possible. He types faster than I can.

1988 I write a paper for the annual conference of the All India Association for Educational Technology. It says maybe we should just give PCs to small children and leave them alone to figure it out by themselves. Surely, some smart kids will learn to use it by themselves. Let the best get better, the rest can follow later, says the last part of the paper. The delegates think it's a fascist, preposterous idea.

1999, January 26 My friend Vivek has a computer sunk into a wall near our office in Kalkaji, New Delhi so that its screen was visible from the other side of the wall. A touchpad was built into the wall as well. Children came running out of the nearest slum and stuck to the wall like glue. A few hours later, a visibly surprised Vivek said the children were surfing.

A few days later, the media arrived and this little experiment got the entire world's attention. I think every newspaper and every TV channel on earth reported on what the media called "The Hole in the Wall". 

But where does this magical computer literacy happen? It took five years, a lot of travel and a lot of money to find out. There were great surprises and great disappointments on the way. But, in the end, Nature's lessons were simple, direct, and, in retrospect, obvious.

(Left) Kalkaji, South Delhi, 1999: The original “Hole-in-the-Wall”; (Right) A “Hole-in-the-Wall” kiosk in Cambodia, a gift from the government of India. The Cambodian kiosks, the first outside India, are showing a computer-literacy impact similar to the ones in India

After the heady rush of the Kalkaji experiment, it was time for some scientific introspection. Within six months, the children of the neighborhood had learned all the mouse operations, could open and close programs, surf the Internet and download games, music and video. When asked, they said they had taught themselves. They were describing the computer in their own terms, often coining words to describe what they saw on screen. The hourglass symbol was "damru," the mouse cursor, "sui" or "teer".

We repeated the experiment twice, once in the city of Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh (Digvijay Singh was interested) and once more in a village called Madantusi in Uttar Pradesh. The Madantusi experiment was the first time we got external funding: Dr Urvashi Sahni, principal of a school in Lucknow and a keen educationist, raised the money from NRI friends in the USA.

Both experiments showed the same results as in Kalkaji. The children seemed to learn to use the computer without any assistance. Language did not seem to matter. Neither did education. Had we stumbled on to something universal about children and computers? I needed research funding, desperately.

The funding came in quite on its own! The ICICI Bank's Social Initiatives department wanted to put ten computers in villages in the Sindhudurg area of Maharashtra. A young banker called Bikram Duggal, to whom thousands of rural children and I should be grateful, backed the idea.

Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, visited Kalkaji and the then principal secretary, Regunathan, a long-time educationist, took what he called a calculated risk. He funded 30 computers in the Ambedkar Nagar area of Delhi. Today, more than six thousand children need to thank him for that decision.

And finally, James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, came to Kalkaji. He had heard of the experiment from Peter Woicke, director of the International Finance Corporation. Together, they decided to fund a three-year research project to find out if what had happened at Kalkaji was a freak accident or a universal learning mechanism. That decision would affect the futures of 40,000 children to begin with and, perhaps, that of all the children in the world one day.

India is as good a laboratory as any for finding out if any child in the world would respond in the same way to a "Hole-in-the-Wall" computer. We have all the diversity in the world that can possibly be had between children: economic, social, genetic, cultural, physical, you name it, we have it.

India is also a good laboratory for finding out if computers can survive outdoors, built into walls and buildings. We have all the different kinds of weather conditions any other part of the world has.

The research design was simple. We would install computers in 22 locations across India, chosen for their diversity of human and climatic conditions. We would then choose 15 random children as a focus group and measure their progress over nine months. We would then compare them with other children who did not have exposure to computers and see if we could get to an explanation for the "Hole in the Wall" effect.

But how does one measure computer literacy? We needed tools. We found tests on the Internet that took hours to administer: too long for our purpose. The funding clock was ticking and we had to find a solution fast.

Desperation can often work wonders in science. In this case, it produced an idea.

Two scientists from our centre, Parimala and Ritu, proposed a test wherein you are shown the 77 common icons in the Windows environment. You are then asked to describe what they might be for. If your description is correct you get a mark.

It seemed like a simple but stupid test. We all use computers quite well, but do we know all the icons? Of course not: some of us don't use the icons at all.

Pari and Ritu did not listen. They administered the test to all our office people. The results were interesting: we got around 70% of the icons right, irrespective of whether we used icons or not. Not only that, the people who did a lot of spreadsheets got the Excel icons right, the ones who did a lot of word processing got the Word icons right. It seemed as though familiarity with an application gave you the ability to guess that application's icons correctly, even if you had never used them.

Another colleague of mine, Monica, and I did a validation of Pari and Ritu's Icon Association Inventory (the official name for the icon test). We gave two sample groups the icon test, along with the much longer American test of computing literacy. The results displayed an incredible 98% correlation. The icon test measured in 20 minutes what the other test would in two hours. We had our measuring instrument. Ritu added a battery of intelligence and creativity tests to the icon test, our basic tool.

While we were sharpening our measuring instruments, Ravi Bisht, the creator of India's first shopping catalogue application among many others, was traveling from village to village all across the subcontinent. Wherever he found an appropriate place and a friendly panchayat or school, he built a little structure with three computers facing the road. His design is today the standard design for the "Hole in the Wall".

Sanjay Gupta, head of our centre, had another set of problems to solve. Touchpads would fail within weeks of installation outdoors. Key tops would vanish. Air-conditioning would cost more than the computers. The dust would get into everything.

In the years between 1999 and 2002, Sanjay and Ravi solved all these problems through a series of inventions: new mice, keyboard covers, reversed exhaust fans and thousand other vital little things. They made it possible for ordinary PCs to work outdoors. Anywhere.

If a computer went into a hang in a remote village in Kanyakumari, would someone have to fly from Delhi, just to press the reset button? We wrote software that would enable us to "see" our computers from anywhere through the Internet. We wrote software to prevent Windows from hanging. We wrote software to protect our desktops from getting accidentally deleted.

And now, we were ready.
In 26 locations, with 100 computers standing in remote villages, our field observers began testing. Focus groups were tested for nine months and the results compared with control groups and other frequent users. An estimated 40,000 children used these computers. They have all made themselves computer literate. The average icon test scores stand at 40% in nine months. We had our proof for self-regulated learning. And this time we know that it will happen anywhere in the world, to any child, in any climate.

I decided to call this method Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The rest of the world continues to call it the "Hole in the Wall". Amen.

In the meanwhile, the government of India gifted five kiosks to the government of Cambodia. These were the first ones we would build outside the country. The library of Alexandria in Egypt wanted to build 30 kiosks. We sent them kits and detailed instructions. The CSIR of South Africa built two kiosks in villages of South Africa. The results were identical to those in India.

The French embassy in Delhi sent Pascal Monteil, a well-known new media artist from Paris, to three of our villages with playground computers. Parimala went along with him to ensure that he did not "teach" anything. The children observed and questioned Pascal intently. Then, they taught themselves digital photography (using his camera) and Photoshop in French. Then they started to draw. "This does not exist anywhere ... except in your mind and the computer," said Moumita, an unkempt little girl from Bishnupur, 24 Parganas, West Bengal.

Pascal took back over a hundred digital creations. He said in a lecture that his concept of how art should be taught has changed.

If the Hole in the Wall is changing the children's analytical skills, English and certain value systems, then its consequences are far greater than I could have imagined.

In the slums, local adults laugh. "If you take away their free time, petty crime and other naughty stuff will not happen," they say. I am amazed. Never thought of it that way.

There is a frequently voiced concern about access to pornographic material through kiosks that are connected to the Internet. While this has happened once in a while, it is quite rare. In the last five years we have had less than 1.5% pornographic usage at any connected kiosk. This is because of several reasons.

First of all, our kiosks are meant for children below 15 years. That audience has only some marginal curiosity about pornography, that too among the upper age groups.

Second, our kiosks are in highly visible, public places. It is rather difficult for children to browse pornographic content when they are in heterogeneous groups and where the screen is visible to passing adults.

Third, our kiosks are monitored remotely and the screens are visible over the Internet. The children know this, as every kiosk has a sign announcing this.

The few instances of pornographic access that the remote monitoring system has recorded in the last four years have been due to access by adults. The reason why such access by adults is not common is because of an interesting design feature.

The kiosks are designed for use by children. The screens are placed lower than the average adult's height so that you would need to stoop to see them. A lid on top of the screen acts as a sunshade and that too tends make it difficult for taller people to crawl under it. There is a cowl on top of the keyboard and mouse that has a gap through which only small hands can go in. There is a seating rod that is placed such that an adult seating on it would not have enough legroom.

All this ensures that an adult needs to be in a rather peculiar position to use the kiosk. It is interesting that some adults have, nevertheless, not been thwarted in their attempts to misuse the kiosk. Fortunately, their numbers are small.

A very large number of children seem to benefit from the kiosks. In independent studies conducted at Madangir, New Delhi, three organizations concluded that about 6,000 out of a total of 9,000 children in the area were now computer literate. This was achieved over three years through 20 effective computers in the Hole-in-the-Wall configuration. This seems to indicate that up to 300 children can share one playground computer.

Based on the experience and data gathered over the last four years, we feel that such "playground" access points should be a part of every primary school. Where primary schools are not available, such facilities could provide even more vital "emergency" educational inputs.

Minimally Invasive Education through public Internet kiosks for children should form an integral part of primary education in the twenty-first century. It can not only close the "digital divide" rapidly, but can also unlock the creative potential for self-development inherent in children in ways that educationists would not have deemed possible even a few years ago.

Dr Sugata Mitra is Chief Scientist, Center for Research in Cognitive Systems, NIIT Ltd

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