Our autumn issue is out now. We chat to Kerry McWilliams, founder and CEO of Lightwork, about Brainspotting. Dive on in to find out more…
technology
This is taken from our spring 2015 issue. Subscribe here to have the autumn issue and following three delivered direct to your door.
While we like to think of the simple life as a beautiful thing that will bring us peace and bliss, there’s no denying the amazingness of technology. I’m certain I spend so much time on devices that I must be part robot by now, but I also have a very long list of the exhilarating and brilliant ‘real life’ moments it’s brought me. Two recent technology stories stood out as particularly uplifting to the Positive Life team.
Kenyan student Salima Visram is the inventive designer behind the ‘Soular Backpack’, school bags for kids that harness solar energy to allow them to power lights to study when it gets dark – without the dangers of kerosene lamps. “From the age of four, my parents ensured that my siblings and I understood the complexities of poverty, and that as I grew as an individual and learnt more about the world, I also needed to ensure that the people around me grew too. Every year since I was very young, I would collect the money I got for my birthday and sponsor an additional child’s lunch for the entire year at the Kikambala Primary School, until a feeding program was introduced.”
His aim was to raise $40,000 and he raised over $50,000! Ottawa tech fi rm eSight also did something incredible. They developed computerised glasses that allowed Kathy Beitz, a legally blind woman, to gaze at her newborn baby. The story spread qucikly around the world. Mums and Dads everywhere attest to how special and profound that moment you fi rst see your child can be, and we all seemed touched that technology could give someone this. eSight’s company founder Conrad Lewis has two legally blind sisters who have the same condition as Beitz and her sister.
indiegogo.com/projects/the-soular-backpack | esighteyewear.com
This is taken from our spring 2015 issue. Subscribe here to have the autumn issue and following three delivered direct to your door.
Whizz Kids Hack Android!
By Laura Ivers
Ethiopian Children Astound the Pros
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an organization that oversees the creation of affordable educational devices for use in the developing world. They recently completed a bold experiment to see if illiterate children, with no previous exposure to written words, could learn how to read all by themselves, through experimenting with tablets preloaded with alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, painting applications and other programs.
Motorola Xoom tablets, which use a solar charging system, were dropped off by OLPC workers to two remote Ethiopian villages. 40 children in total, who had previously never seen printed materials, road signs or even printed packaging, were chosen for the project and the tablets were delivered in closed boxes, taped shut that included no instructions.
OLPC’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte, speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference said, “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android. Someone in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer elaborated further, “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that. And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”
The experiment was a response to the problem that over 100 million first-grade children worldwide have no access to schooling and results from early observations on the experiment have been highly encouraging, presenting exciting new possibilities for education and learning globally.