What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

Back when I was in school, we learned about physics the old fashioned way: by dropping bowling balls on our feet. But kids these days aren't interesting in bowling balls and pain, they're interested in video games, and Valve's new education initiative uses Portal 2, GLaDOS, and Chell to teach physics and math.

Every year a staggering 50 million metric tons of e-waste — TVs, computers and cellphones — are deposited in landfills. In the U.S. we're often removed from the problem, but in third world countries sprawling landfills are often inter-twined with living and working spaces. An initiative has been floated to taking e-waste from landfills and using it to create e-learning gadgets for the local communities.

You read that headline correctly. Nolan Bushnell, who you may know as Atari's founder says he's been working on a project called "Speed to Learn" — a cloud computing game that he believes can be implemented to give students a complete high school education in under one year.