A PC in a Delhi wall: 1999's Hole in the Wall shows children teach themselves

In 1999, as chief scientist at NIIT in New Delhi, Mitra wanted to test whether curiosity alone — no teacher, no syllabus — could drive learning in a slum community that had no computer access.

Embed an Internet-connected computer in a public wall with no instructions, and watch whether children teach themselves and each other.

Mitra's team dug a hole in a wall adjoining the NIIT campus in Kalkaji, installed a broadband-connected PC, left it free to use and watched with a hidden camera; children figured out browsing and searching, picked up English in the process, and taught each other — then the experiment was repeated in rural sites hundreds of miles away.

The experiment coined 'minimally invasive education' and grew into Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) used in India, the UK and the US; Mitra won the 2013 TED Prize and built School in the Cloud labs (2014–2016); one of the original children, Arun Chavan, went on to a PhD at Yale.

In 1999, Sugata Mitra — then chief scientist at NIIT in New Delhi — had the idea that children might learn on their own if curiosity, not a teacher, was the trigger. His team dug a hole in a wall bordering a slum in Kalkaji, installed an Internet-connected PC, and simply left it there, with a hidden camera recording what happened.

The children figured out how to use the computer, browse and search the web, learned English words in the process, and taught one another what they discovered. There was no instruction, syllabus or adult supervision. Mitra called the phenomenon 'minimally invasive education', and repeated the experiment in villages hundreds of miles from Delhi with similar results.

The finding grew into Self-Organised Learning Environments — small groups of children sharing one computer and answering 'Big Questions' together — and into the 2013 TED Prize wish 'Build a School in the Cloud', which funded learning labs in India, the UK and the US from 2014 to 2016. A 2025 peer-reviewed follow-up studied how those labs fared after funding ended; one of the original children, Arun Chavan, went on to a PhD at Yale.

It inverted the default: instead of asking how to teach children, ask what happens when nobody teaches.

The wall made the computer public and safe — visible, communal and free — so curiosity spread peer to peer.

The hidden camera turned a hunch into observable evidence, giving the idea academic and media credibility.

It scaled from a hole in a wall to a global pedagogical model and a TED Prize project.

Instead of adding instruction, remove it: an environment that provokes curiosity can outperform formal teaching — the design question is what to leave out.

Mitra became professor of educational technology at Newcastle University; his TED Prize funded School in the Cloud labs in India, the UK and the USA, and Self-Organised Learning Environments spread to classrooms worldwide. A 2025 Journal of Learning for Development study visited eight former sites: learning gains persisted, but most labs closed once funding ended as running costs outpaced community resources. The experiment remains one of the most cited challenges to conventional schooling, and its 'Big Questions' and remote 'Granny Sessions' are still used as pedagogy.