by Brian Dear
As more money and people and resources were brought to bear, the ideas began to develop. One improvement sought to help students know why they got something wrong. Immediate Feedback was a bedrock principle, sure, but how about making that feedback meaningful? Perhaps there was a way to do that. Perhaps using a machine wasn’t the right way to do it. Was there another, simpler way?
Harking back to Edward Thorndike’s 1912 ideas, researchers believed there was, with textbooks. Not just ordinary textbooks, but “scrambled” textbooks. Make it so a page out of an instructional book—call it a “programmed text”—posed a question to the student, and offered some multiple-choice answers. Tell the student if you chose answer “a,” turn to, say, this page. If you choose “b,” go to this page, and so on. One of those multiple-choice answers was right, but in this framework, the authors of the text could provide meaningful—and instant—feedback to the student dependent on which answer the student chose.
One proponent of programmed texts was Norman Crowder, who held a variety of psychology and training positions in the U.S. Air Force. Crowder believed a scrambled book was all that was needed to make the feedback meaningful. Unlike Skinner’s devices, if you got the wrong answer you weren’t just locked from moving to the next problem or shown the right answer and forced to move on. You could stop and learn why your answer was wrong. For instance, in the 1960 book Adventures in Algebra, written by Crowder and Grace C. Martin, and marketed by Doubleday as a “Tutor Text,” the reader is presented with concepts and questions of steadily increasing complexity. Each question offers a number of multiple-choice answers, and the reader is told what page to turn to depending upon which answer is chosen. Wrong answers are given detailed explanations, and, occasionally, the authors scold the reader for choosing a particularly boneheaded answer, directing them back to the beginning of the chapter since it appears they didn’t understand the concepts at all.
Crowder seems to have realized that while Tutor Texts were powerful, they still relied on this honor system, where all of the material, all of the answers, were right there in plain view. It was easier than ever to cheat. In time he began to think about mechanical devices that took this “branching” concept to the next level—devices that finally fulfilled Thorndike’s 1912 vision. He would team up with a company to build the AutoTutor, which presented instructional material as frames in a film, and could be controlled by a computer program on the back end that knew which frame of the film to jump to depending upon a student’s answer.
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In December 1958, all of the major figures in the automated teaching field, including Skinner, Pressey, Crowder, and the rest, met at a conference, “The Art and Science of the Automatic Teaching of Verbal and Symbolic Skills,” in Philadelphia. One notable paper, by Gustave Rath, Nancy S. Anderson, and R. C. Brainerd of IBM, stood out from the others. It was the only presentation that explored the idea of using a computer to teach. They described how they had built a program on an IBM 650 to “simulate a teaching machine,” specifically one that could teach binary arithmetic. The student interacted with the system via an IBM 650 Inquiry Station typewriter. It marked the crude beginning of what would become, as computers became more affordable and more widely available, the obvious direction to pursue with teaching machines. Computers afforded a level of flexibility impossible to achieve in mechanical devices. The key was software: computer software was unquestionably more flexible for programming instruction than the painstaking labeling of disks and paper tapes or twiddling with knobs, sliders, and fragile pulleys and gears.
One notable finding in the IBM project was the acknowledgment that a computer spends most of its time waiting for the student to do something. In “computer time,” that wait time amounts to what would be thousands of millennia to humans, with brief interruptions when a student types a letter at the keyboard. All computers are this way, even today. Your fancy laptop computer is primarily sitting there idle, checking every tiny fraction of a nanosecond to see if there’s anything to do yet, and from the perspective of the computer processor, usually there isn’t. But the insight that the IBM researchers came away with would prove to be key to all future computers: “Since the computer spends most of its time waiting for the student, suggestions for the utilization of this time are as follows: by multiplexing, the computer could present and score problems for several students who sat at different ‘Inquiry Stations.’ ” Soon the general name for this powerful notion would be called “time-sharing.”
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Skinner had finally achieved his dream of becoming a novelist with the 1948 release of Walden Two, in which he depicts a behaviorist utopian commune. A few years later, John Gilpin, a math major in Dickinson College, found the book in the college library. Intrigued with Walden Two’s notion of a “designed community,” and believing that a Walden Two community actually existed, Gilpin wrote to Skinner asking for more information. He would learn that there was a group attempting to live out the Walden Two vision, so he hopped on a bus and headed for Boston to join the group, but nothing came of it. Gilpin asked Skinner for a job but was told nothing was available. Gilpin told him he’d even work for free—he just wanted a chance to work at the lab. Skinner relented, offering him a one-eighth part-time job, at the lowest possible pay scale, working with Skinner’s research colleagues Jim Holland and Susan Meyer to glean information from the teaching machine data gathered from Skinner’s Natural Science 114. They spent the summer sorting through the pile of data produced from the fifteen or so machines in the lab. “Every time a student completed one of these disks,” Gilpin recalls, “he produced a paper tape, and so they had a paper tape for every disk….They had this huge pile of paper tapes. The task was to go through and see to what extent the students got the right answers. Because, of course, part of the ideology was the student should never be wrong.”
Gilpin, fresh out of college, was now immersed in what he believed was an “extremely cutting-edge development,” yet something wasn’t right. “I found that every time I went down [to the lab],” says Gilpin, “in less than half an hour, I was fighting sleep.” Using Skinner’s teaching machine, if a student felt she answered a question correctly, she was supposed to move a lever to the right (causing the machine to record a little hole in a paper tape), and not move the lever if she felt she got the answer wrong. Problem was, Gilpin observed, since the programmed instruction had been written in such a way that it was fairly easy to get most of the answers right, a student would move the lever to the right whether or not she thought it was correct or not. “I never quite had the guts to challenge Holland or Skinner about it,” he says.
Gilpin eventually moved on from Skinner’s lab to Bell Labs, but that didn’t last long, and he later accepted a 1959 offer to work on programmed instruction at Earlham College in Indiana. At Earlham he worked with a team developing scrambled textbooks. One day, Max Beberman, who had founded the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics (UICSM) and would become widely known for leading the “New Math” movement of the 1960s, came to speak at Earlham. Gilpin was impressed, and later wrote to Beberman to inquire if there were jobs at UICSM. There were, and in 1962 Gilpin moved to the University of Illinois and joined UICSM, where he developed programmed instructional materials.
UICSM was located next door to University High School, which happened to be located near an odd-looking four-story brick building with an equally odd-looking radar tower adjacent to it. This was the Coordinated Science Laboratory (the new name for Control Systems Laboratory). Inside, among CSL’s many projects, was one centered around “automatic teaching” via computer. The project was two years old, gaining speed, and had a weird name: PLATO.
2
An Educational Emergency
Seventy thousand fans turned out on the first Wednesday of October 1957 to watch game one of the World Series as the New York Yankees, on their home turf, beat the Milwaukee Braves. The teams met again the next day, but this time the Braves prevailed,
4–2. Friday being a travel day, game three wouldn’t be played until Saturday in Milwaukee. Instead of baseball that Friday, Americans had another notable event to consume their attention: the CBS television network airing of the premiere episode of a new situation comedy series called Leave It to Beaver. No doubt CBS was pleased that there was no World Series game that day to distract potential viewers from its new show, but it’s even less doubtful that anyone at CBS, or anywhere else in America for that matter, could have anticipated something very different happening: an event, a phenomenon, a thing that would distract the nation a great deal that evening, and then even more the next day, and then even more the rest of the weekend, and then kept distracting everyone for months and years to come.
That Friday, the future came barging in without so much as a knock, and it had a name: Sputnik. While Casey Stengel and the Yankees entourage chugged along on their sixteen-hour, 1,100-mile railroad journey to Milwaukee, the Soviet Union had successfully launched, at 2:28 p.m. New York time, a rocket that carried a 184-pound, twenty-two-inch shiny metal sphere into space, becoming the first man-made artifact to orbit the earth.
Early the next morning, twenty-five minutes before the sun would rise over Cambridge, Massachusetts, B. F. Skinner, his wife, Eve, and daughters Deborah and Julie were already up and outside, met by a gentle breeze of chilly morning air on the terrace of their Ellsworth Avenue home. The overnight clouds had cleared by the time they went outside, and at around 6:20 a.m., they looked up and saw a tiny dot move across the northeast sky, passing by the Big Dipper and dissolving into the predawn light growing along the edge of the horizon. A delighted Skinner jotted down in his journal, “Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics has been experimentally confirmed!”
That same weekend, on a farm near the airport just outside Champaign-Urbana, in east-central Illinois, a group of electrical engineer friends gathered in the dark to hoist up a large antenna pole. The group included Jay Gooch, Dominic Skaperdas, and, at twenty-three, the youngest of the bunch, Donald Bitzer, known as “Bitz” to his friends. Bitzer, with his short haircut, can-do spirit, and “tell ya what I’m gonna do” Midwestern car-salesman affability, could have walked right off the set of the brand-new Leave It to Beaver show. They all worked at the Control Systems Laboratory, a classified military research lab on the nearby University of Illinois campus, from which they had “borrowed” a few pieces of equipment. They wired the pole up to some radio equipment, connected the radio equipment to a tape recorder, tuned the radio to the right frequency, and then settled down to wait for Sputnik to streak across the sky. They were hoping to capture and record a certain beep-beep-beep signal that Sputnik was said to be broadcasting. Sputnik did not disappoint.
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There were two kinds of reactions to Sputnik. Only the first kind of reaction got widely reported in the news: that it was something to be feared.
“A shocker like Pearl Harbor, waking America up and making it buckle down,” is how The New York Times described the events of October 4, 1957. The Soviets had beaten the Americans to space, and Americans were in a state of disbelief. Sputnik—a common Russian word meaning “fellow traveler”—was worldwide news. On Saturday one Frenchman quipped, “The Russians put up Sputnik yesterday, and it goes around the world saying beep-beep-beep. Then, when it gets to the U.S., it says ha-ha-ha.” In those first few days after October 4, American newspapers struggled to describe Sputnik, many choosing to refer to it as “ARTIFICIAL MOON,” or, just as likely, “RED MOON.”
For many Americans, Sputnik might as well have been a hammer and sickle orbiting the earth. The exceptional Sputnik defied American exceptionalism: a shiny metal ball made by communists, hurled into the heavens by communists, tumbling across a sky now owned by communists, at 18,000 miles per hour, soaring over America every ninety minutes, and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it. America, busy still with its baby boom a dozen years after the victories of World War II, was suddenly an embarrassed nation.
How could leading scientists and technologists have let the country down so badly? Did we not have enough of them? Were the Reds smarter? How does America get back in the lead? These were questions the politicians and the media were asking. The White House publicly played down the launch but privately worried about the immediate aftermath: Soviet claims of scientific and technological superiority were gaining wide acceptance amid public concern that the balance of military power was shifting to the USSR. One senator made a billion-dollar Manhattan Project–scale proposal to compete with the Soviets in the Space Race.
“The more Americans were told by the men in Washington not to worry,” one historian wrote, “the more they panicked. For all its simplicity, small size, and inability to do more than orbit the Earth and transmit meaningless radio blips, Sputnik’s impact on America and the world was enormous and totally unanticipated. To the man or woman in the street, it was vastly confusing and most threatening.”
“A colossal panic was underway,” wrote Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, “with congressmen and newspapermen leading a huge pack that was baying at the sky.” To them Sputnik “had become the second momentous event of the Cold War. The first had been the Soviet development of the atomic bomb in 1953.” Says Wolfe,
From a purely strategic standpoint, the fact that the Soviets had the rocket power to launch [Sputnik] meant that they now also had the capacity to deliver the bomb on an intercontinental ballistic missile. The panic reached far beyond the relatively sane concern for tactical weaponry, however. [Sputnik] took on a magical dimension—among highly placed persons especially, judging by opinion surveys. It seemed to dredge up primordial superstitions about the influence of heavenly bodies. It gave birth to a modern, i.e., technological, astrology. Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil. Lyndon Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, said that whoever controlled “the high ground” of space would control the world.
To achieve and hold on to that “high ground” would require not just a lot of hard work and heavy lifting but also a lot of smart people. Sputnik suggested that America did not have enough smart people. The West’s hysteria was not expected by the Soviets, but they were quick observers, and almost immediately they began to pump out propaganda to heighten it and sow confusion even further. The result was an escalating cycle of fear, mobilization, and worry for the future. Given that Sputnik appeared right in the middle of the Cold War—in the six months prior to the launch the U.S. and USSR combined conducted some thirty-nine atomic bomb tests, and fourteen in the six months after the launch—for one superpower to surprise another with the first-mover advantage in space raised legitimate concerns about the Soviet Union’s intentions and America’s ability to get to space as well.
Among other things, Sputnik fueled calls for immediate and sweeping reform of American education. Getting to space was rocket science, and rocket science required math and science skills, and clearly the American education system had let the country down in those areas. It had to be fixed, and fast. The top priorities? Improving scientific inquiry and mathematical problem solving. How could America have a chance at winning the new Space Race if it didn’t have top-notch scientists and mathematicians?
One month after the launch of Sputnik came another launch, the much heavier Sputnik 2, a larger craft that carried inside it a once stray Moscow dog named Laika, instantly dubbed “Muttnik” by American media. Unlike the relatively small silver ball lobbed into orbit the month before, this time the Soviets had managed to hurl a thirteen-foot-high, 1,100-pound dog-carrying metallic cone into space. It did not require much effort to imagine a nuclear warhead in that cone, instead of a dog.
In February 1958, as a direct consequence of the Sputnik launches, the U.S. Department of Defense created ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, with a mission to embark on technological research and development projects of national importance. Congress scramb
led as well. That same year they passed two major pieces of legislation, the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the NASA space agency, and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law in July and September, respectively.
“The Congress finds that an educational emergency exists,” the NDEA bill declared, “and requires action by the federal government. Assistance will come from Washington to help develop as rapidly as possible those skills essential to the national defense.” Title I of the act went on, “The security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women. The present emergency demands that additional and more adequate educational opportunities be made available. The defense of this Nation depends upon mastery of modern techniques developed from complex scientific principles. It depends as well upon the discovery and development of new principles, new techniques, and new knowledge.”
In simple terms, this was a cause the nation could rally behind, at a time when Washington had money and was willing to spread a whole lot of it around. Businesses, universities, schools, think tanks, and state governments didn’t hesitate to put out their hands. The timing boded well for creators of teaching machines. Back in 1929, Sidney Pressey’s timing had been the stuff of tragic comedies: his feverish efforts to drum up interest in his devices collided with the stock market crash and the Great Depression. But now, thanks to the birth of ARPA, NASA, and the NDEA, prospects were looking bright for B. F. Skinner’s and Norm Crowder’s work, as well as the countless academic research and business ventures that rose up seemingly overnight to popularize and profit from their work. The repeated usage of the word “emergency” in the NDEA legislation helped drive people to pitch in and help the nation’s young men and women achieve “the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills.”
