School in the Cloud: a TED prize winner's quest to transform education

Sugata Mitra is a polymath who has studied energy storage systems, designed batteries and worked on computer networking. But for the past 15 years, he has been preoccupied with educational research. His radical ideas about self-organised learning won him the TED prize in 2013, which gave him US$1 million to realise his vision for a global "School in the Cloud".

This builds on Mitra's discovery that given access to the wealth of information available on the web, children can learn a great deal on their own. The idea is to create a platform that links learning "labs", where youngsters, poor and rich, can work together on questions designed to spark their curiosity in different areas and lead them to think critically.

Mitra's experiments in education began in 1999, when he was chief scientist at the National Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi and feeling particularly frustrated that poor Indian children had no access to computers.

"The fact that rich children had computers, but the poor could not afford them was kind of annoying. I thought, let's at least give one computer to a group of poor kids and see what they do with it," the 62-year-old says.

Mitra installed a computer with an internet connection in a hole in a wall near a slum in south Delhi, and filmed youngsters' response through a hidden camera.

Inquisitive street children soon spotted it and figured out on their own not only how to use the device but also to use it to surf the internet. His hunch - that curious children are driven to explore, discover and share their learning with each other - was confirmed.