MA. National Research Institute for Science Policy
Abstract
Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School sits next to a dump where a rotten smell drifts through the classroom. Sergio Juarez Correa was used to teaching that kind of class through the government-mandated curriculum, but he’d come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time because test scores were poor and the students who did well weren’t truly engaged. He searched for ideas online and was interested in the method of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK.. It was an emerging educational philosophy that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computer. Without any instruction they were able to teach themselves by computer. Juarez Correa became a slow-motion conduit to the internet, because they had few computers and access to internet in their poor city. Therefore he employed a new teaching technique, it was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity and student-led environment. By this method his students did well and some of them even got the highest scores in the country, especially one of them, a small poor girl placed first in Mexico.
)