Comment 3 on The Butterfly Project

The event has taken place and a number of very interesting areas have developed, as a result.

Essentially, it was a small piece of research, with just six village children aged 12 to 15 participating, 3 girls and 3 boys.

We devised a number of tests, to cover areas of potential talent: a) Verbal b) Artistic c) Musical d) Visual-spatial e) Technical f) Creative g) Leadership h) Reasoning i) Numerical j) Memory

We also interviewed them quite rigorously about their life and aspirations.

Two of the participants were from remote villages, where they were seven hours walk from the nearest village. Neither of these two could write with any degree of fluency, although they knew how to hold a pen.

It was clear to us that the elder boy, who could not write had a significant level of intelligence, as he was able to tackle complex questioning and was able to offer good reasoning and creative skills. He was also something of an artist.

Of the girls, none came from the remote areas, but one showed a level of intelligenmce significantly higher than the other two (as would not be unexpected.) The tests were not all successful and some were particularly hard to measure. We were uncomforable wioth our numerical ability testing, as the children were unable to complete it - the intention was to avoid Maths at all costs, but set up a complex counting task and also a "selling" task, where they had to work out the change from a fruit-selling transaction (as I understand Brazilian streetkids are used to doing).

The younger "remote village" boy performed poorly on almost all tests (barring the artistic and musical), but he did not strike me as being less intelligent than the rest. On the memory test, he did extremely badly.

I will be writing up the results soon, as there were clearly some interesting findings. I have a new idea as a result, which is to offer a rural centre, where remote children can come for weeks away, so they can enjoy the broader range of lifestyle that others enjoy. This is clearly unfairly holding them back and some action needs to be taken to give them more opportunity.

I have just these purely qualitative results and a follow-up and more "serious" testing process will I hope be developed from here. Working with the "remote" children was a definite success and one could see changes in their ability levels in only a single day (more than the others in the group.) We promised we would involve them again in something in the New Year.