No Child Left Behind: Thai Government Gives Tablets to Grade Schoolers

As schools worldwide seek to deal with an invasion of tablet PCs in the classroom, a Thailand government program has apparently decided that “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em”: A pilot program distributed some 500 free tablet PCs to first- and fourth-graders in five urban schools in the country, and plans are afoot to supply 470,000 first-graders with the devices this year.

The “One Tablet PC Per Child” program is going forward despite survey results showing massive opposition. According to a recent survey, some 94.1% of respondents were against the plan due to the young age of the tablet recipients.

Predictably, time spent on the tablets was nearly an exact 75/25 between entertainment purposes and educational use: “They mostly use a computer for visiting Facebook and playing the Angry Birds game,” survey overseer Amnuay Sunthornchot told the Bangkok Post.