Sugata Mitra's life changed the day he stuck a computer in a hole in the wall of a slum in New Delhi. A computer science professor at a private school, Mitra kept wondering whether the rich kids he was teaching really were inherently talented (as their parents kept insisting), or if the poor kids over the wall just weren't getting a fair shake. So he left that online PC installed in a wall like an ATM, and walked away.

When the slum kids figured out how to use the computer and started teaching each other — even started teaching each other English so they could use it better — Mitra knew he was on to something. He started testing the concept in more slums, and had the computers ask the kids ever harder questions about DNA construction.

The kids could figure out extremely complex answers, it turned out, so long as they had an adult who kept looking over their shoulder and being amazed at what they were doing — "like a grandmother," Mitra says. He soon automated that process by getting volunteer grandmothers in the UK with broadband Internet and a webcam to talk to the slum kids. He called it "the granny cloud."

These experiments, soon repeated around the world, led Mitra to come up with a whole new theory of education. He calls it SOLE, for Self-Organized Learning Environments. Give kids a computer, ask them a serious adult-level question, encourage their efforts to answer it, and stand well back.

For these efforts — and based on his plan to build a "school in the Cloud" for poor kids across India — Mitra won the $1 million TED prize Tuesday night. Check out the full video of his talk above, and let us know in the comments: Is this the future of education?

Thumbnail courtesy of TED, James Duncan Davidson