Sugata Mitra

Global education superstar Sugatomitra is a 2013 TED Award winner, initiator of the \Hole in the Wall\ project, concept proposer of cloud based schools, and source of inspiration for the Oscar winning film \Slumdog Millionaire\. Sugat Mithra is a professor of educational technology at the School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom. He is a retired chief scientist at NIIT and has served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Due to covering a wide range of academic fields in 30 years of research, Sugat is praised as a erudite by the University of London. He was also named a global education superstar by The Times. Sugat is famous for its \Hole in the Wall\ project, which is widely used in literacy and education. He also proposed the concept of cloud based schools and won the 2013 TED Award for $1 million. He envisioned a cloud school that fully utilizes students' self-learning ability, greatly reduces educational investment, subverts traditional educational methods, and creates educational equity. In 1999, the \Hole in the Wall\ project was first launched as an experiment aimed at children's learning. At the beginning of the experiment, a computer was placed in a wall pavilion in the Kalkaji slum of Delhi, and children could use it for free. The purpose of this experiment is to prove that children can easily learn through computers without any formal training. Sugat referred to this type of learning as the Wall Digging Online MIE Education Program. This experiment was conducted in multiple locations, with over 40 cave in wall projects in suburban India. In 2004, Cambodia also implemented this experiment. The interests of the \Hole in the Wall\ project include education, remote display, spontaneous organization system, cognitive system, natural science, and consciousness. The hole in the wall experiment project has also left a mark on popular culture. After reading reports on the Sugat experiment, Indian novelist and diplomat Vikas Swalup became inspired and created his first novel, Qamp; A. Subsequently adapted as the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire.