by Brian Dear
Over on the whole-numbers strand, Bonnie Seiler developed a series of lessons that exercised a child’s ability to creatively mix addition, subtraction, and multiplication operations to arrive at a desired number. Her most famous lesson was West, or How the West Was One + Three X Four: A Race Between the Wells Fargo Stagecoach and the Union Pacific Railroad, in which a stagecoach races a train from Tombstone to Death Valley to Dodge, Dry Gulch, Kansas City, Santa Fe, Urbana, and finally Red-Gulch on a track that zigs and zags its way down the PLATO screen. Seiler had originally designed the game to be a race between a horse and a camel, from one oasis to another in the desert. Then she discovered that Dave Andersen, one of CERL’s systems programmers, had created a little train graphic as an alternative character set, which gave her the idea of racing a train versus a stagecoach. Then the idea for the Wild West came to her, and finally, the full name of the game.
How the West Was One lesson Credit 25
The child could play against another player or play against PLATO. The lesson had three number wheels, the first offering 1, 2, and 3, the second offering 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the third offering 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Each dial in the three wheels would randomly turn to point to the value for that turn, and then the child had to include those three numbers in the best mathematical expression they could think of that would achieve the optimal value, which would then move their piece, be it the train or the stagecoach. For example, if the number wheels gave you 3, 0, and 4 on your first turn, it was probably best to do a simple expression like “3*4+0,” which moved you ahead 12 spaces. If PLATO rolled 1, 4, and 6 on the wheels, you could type “6*(4+1)” to get 30, a big move. The child could have typed “6+4*1” but that would only yield 10. Kids needed to understand mathematical orders of operations and the ideal use of parentheses. But even if a child figured out an expression that resulted in a big number, that wasn’t always the ideal move. Sometimes it might be better to calculate a smaller value, because there were shortcuts between towns that jumped you ahead past the next town. Also, if you landed right on a town, you were automatically jumped to the next town.
How the West Was One was another perfect example of how the designers working for Robert Davis in the math project took his mantra “Math is a story of the real world” to heart.
Elementary Reading
NSF also funded an elementary reading curriculum, so CERL formed a team to design and develop those lessons. The team included John Risken, who headed up the project, plus Bob Yeager, Priscilla Obertino (Priscilla Corielle), Lezlie Fillman, and TUTOR programmers Tom Schaefges, Brian Shankman, and John David Eisenberg.
Yeager was finishing up a master’s degree in 1971 in Chicago, having come from six years of classroom teaching a few years earlier only to grow fascinated by the potential for computers in education. One day a mentor urged him to check out what was happening with PLATO down at the University of Illinois. He went down to Urbana, got a graduate assistantship at the College of Education, found CERL, and got a demo of PLATO III. “My jaw just about dropped,” says Yeager. The excitement, ambition, and technical wizardry he saw around CERL, not to mention the immense potential of PLATO IV coming around the bend, had him sold. In short order he changed his career plans, quit his College of Education assistantship, and joined CERL’s elementary reading program.
Early on, Bob Davis, who headed up the math program, managed to recruit Seymour Papert from MIT to come out to Uni High and also hang out at CERL to let the elementary math and reading teams pick his brain. Papert ran occasional seminars out of a small house near Uni High. “There’d only be about a dozen of us or so,” says Yeager, “we’d sit on the floor and Papert would expound.” Papert described the LOGO project and what he’d learned from that so far. But what influenced Yeager the most was hearing Papert’s overall philosophy. “Don’t try to manipulate the student, let them manipulate the computer. And that’s where Papert was at.”
Yeager had left one of Papert’s seminars inspired but struggling to think of a way to apply his philosophy to the elementary reading project. The idea came to him in the shower the next morning. “I was trying to figure out, how do I do what Papert does, in elementary reading? And I came up with the idea of Sentences.”
Sentences was a PLATO lesson that presented a series of sixteen words and their corresponding icons inside four rows of touch boxes on the lower half of the screen. There were eight nouns: tree, car, girl, rabbit, boy, house, dog, and cat; four verbs: walks, jumps, runs, and carries; and four other useful words: over, from, to, and the. By touching the words in a certain way, a student could form sentences, which—if they made sense after being evaluated by the TUTOR code—were then animated on the screen. For example, “The boy carries the cat from the tree to the girl.” The lesson would evaluate the structure of the sentence, determining if it was a valid sentence or not (if not, the lesson would simply say “Sorry, I do not understand that”), and then drew pictures of the selected nouns “doing” the action indicated in the sentence, in this case, plotting a picture of little tree on the left, with a picture of a boy carrying a cat above himself, slowly walking over to a little picture of a girl on the right. On top of that, the lesson activated an EIS-built random-access audio device to “speak” the words while the animation was going, so that the student could read the text of the just-invented sentence, visualize the action through animation, and hear the sentence spoken back, as a combined multimedia extravaganza providing Immediate Feedback to the student. Things got interesting when students used the word “over” in their sentences. The lesson handled sentences like “the girl walks over the house to the car” not by having the girl literally walk over a house, but rather, by PLATO drawing a road with a bridge over a house, then animated a girl moving from the left, across the bridge, over to the right, where she stopped in front of a car.
Sentences lesson Credit 26
The elementary reading team made extensive use of multimedia in their lessons. They discovered, as other authoring groups in other disciplines did, that the random-access audio device was woefully inaccurate and prone to playing the wrong audio clip, if it played one at all. The solution, crude but somewhat effective, was to always make sure there were multiple copies of the audio clip adjacent to each other recorded on the big fifteen-inch floppy disk that was placed inside the machine. That way, when a TUTOR command asked for clip number 1234, if the machine gave you 1233 or 1235 by mistake, you greatly reduced the chance of playing the wrong audio to the student.
Yeager had started out as a staunch behaviorist in college, but by the time he got to the UI’s College of Education to pursue a PhD, the cognitive science approach was beginning to take hold with some of the professors there, particularly Richard C. Anderson. Anderson’s thinking, plus Papert’s, led Yeager to “flip,” he says, to the “cognitive side.” Yeager felt that the elementary reading project team was still largely behaviorist in orientation, and was concerned that they weren’t incorporating enough cognitive ideas into their lesson designs. “I was the only person who was moving into the cognitive world.” In particular, Yeager was concerned with a strand of lessons covering phonics, which he felt were not up to par with other lessons in the curriculum.
“We had a much more challenging goal,” says Risken, “that we had set for ourselves by trying to go to the very beginning of the learning-to-read process, than the elementary math people did, who aimed their stuff at grades 4-5-6 and assumed a certain level of arithmetic skill to start with. They probably achieved their goals much more cleanly and clearly than we achieved ours.”
December 1975 was the end of the first semester of the “demonstration year” for NSF and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Testing revealed that the kids utilizing the elementary reading PLATO lessons were reading at a far lower level than the kids who were in the control classes. “The PLATO lessons were actually having a negative impact upon the kids,” says Yeager. Shortly afterward, John Risken left to join Control Data in Mi
nneapolis. NSF sent another team out for another project checkup, but Yeager wanted nothing to do with the meeting, so Priscilla Corielle ran it. “They all went away happy that we were going to be in good shape,” Yeager says. Yeager, Corielle, and company worked to fix what they believed were deficiencies in the lessons. “We changed things around,” says Yeager, “and at the end of the year we sort of broke even.”
Chemistry
One day around 1963, Stan Smith, a chemistry professor, stopped by to speak to Bitzer about creating a PLATO lesson in chemistry depicting the rotation of a molecule on-screen. Bitzer sent him to Lezlie Fillman, who made drawings of a molecule in various positions that would each be photographed and loaded as slides in PLATO III’s slide selector, to then be played back in rapid sequence to animate the rotation of the molecule for students. She and Smith worked for a long time on making that sequence. It was the first of many lessons Smith would undertake. As the authoring process improved over time, particularly with the arrival of TUTOR, Smith was able to create more lessons for his students. Among the more famous was Titrate, a lesson that gave a student a fairly complete simulation, within all of the limits imposed by the PLATO terminal, of a laboratory experience in which the student would titrate some chemicals (titration being the gradual addition of one chemical solution into a volume of another solution until the mix changes color or otherwise reaches chemical neutralization, in order to determine the concentration of the unknown solution). It is a common college-level lab experiment, and is expensive and messy to roll out to hundreds of undergraduates in large lab settings. Far easier to simulate the entire thing online, and Stan Smith was just the professor to do it. His lessons would be used by thirty-five years’ worth of UI undergraduates, on PLATO III through PLATO IV and onward to microcomputers and the Web. Smith epitomized in the late 1960s throughout the 1990s the fearless, enthusiastic academic pioneer who cared deeply about developing compelling interactive simulations and tutorials for students in college settings. His work was often featured around the world in PLATO demos at conferences and other venues, and yet for all the recognition he achieved, UI’s publish-or-perish chemistry department did not view his work equal to research or publishing peer-reviewed articles, and it made it difficult for him to get tenure. Other departments on campus held similar biases. George Grimes, a professor of veterinary medicine who developed numerous lessons on PLATO, ran into similar problems. He worked day and night for six years on PLATO, but never got faculty support. “I had been promised a promotion,” he says, but “those on the committee that decides on promotions had decided this was sort of a mechanical thing that didn’t deserve the significance of the research that was going on in veterinary areas.”
Titrate lesson Credit 27
Bob Yeager has a theory why Stan Smith’s work was so good. “Good teachers like Stan Smith used cognitive strategies even if they didn’t know it or it wasn’t labeled that way. They taught content, but they also taught structure of the content (the mental models that were the earliest of the cognitive contributions). And they probably also taught a passion for their subject matter—something I’m not sure any theory accounts for. When Stan created his PLATO lessons, all that went into them and that’s why they were good. They were behavioral, cognitive, constructivist, and things that still don’t have a label. They were good teaching.”
Biology
Perhaps the most famous lesson ever developed on PLATO was one by David C. Eades, Gary Hyatt, and Paul Tenczar on fruit flies. It had first been done on PLATO III, and was later redone for PLATO IV’s higher-quality plasma displays. As Stan Smith had discovered for chemistry, these biologists realized that PLATO was exceptionally efficient at exposing a large population of students to scientific concepts that traditionally required time-consuming, expensive laboratory time but could now be simulated on the computer. In this case, the concepts concerned the genetics of fruit flies and how certain traits are passed down or lost in subsequent generations. By mating certain genetic traits in male and female flies, one could observe the results instantly, whereas it took time in a lab. In fact you could continue crossing different genes over and over again to see the outcomes. But what made the lesson such a spectacle—particularly in demonstrations to funding agencies—were the graphics. Once you had specified the types of traits you wanted to breed in a generation of flies, the lesson then showed you all of the offspring from that mating. Some would have no wings, some might have different eyes or other subtle traits, but students could see them clearly as multiple rows of fruit fly pictures cascaded down the screen.
It is also noteworthy that, as in Stan Smith’s chemistry lessons, these simulations did not simply provide a series of choices on the screen at each step in the experiments. Rather, the authors of these lessons simply displayed a statement like “What would you like to do?” with an -arrow- command awaiting user input. The student would be expected to know what to do at each step, such as “see the flies” or “do a cross.” Stan Smith had similar prompts in his simulations, asking the student what to do next, without explicitly stating what the choices were.
Music
G. David Peters had received a master’s degree in music education from UI in 1965 and then had gone off to join the Houston Symphony and teach music in Houston. In 1968, he received a UI alumni newsletter that had an article in it about the PLATO III system. Peters had been thinking about pursuing a PhD, and when he saw the article and photos, he was intrigued, and decided to pursue his doctoral studies back at Illinois. He received his PhD in music education and computer-based instruction in 1974. He also headed up the PLATO Music Project within the School of Music. Unlike some other UI departments, where just a few professors fully embraced PLATO, learning TUTOR, and programming their own lessons while the department itself tended to look the other way, UI’s school of music was very supportive of PLATO and of professors seeking to use it. By 1977 over thirty professors and more than a dozen graduate teaching assistants were using PLATO in their music courses, in which over two thousand students were enrolled. Those courses extended over a vast range of topics including music acoustics, music theory, ear training, tests and measurements, statistics and music, percussion terminology, behavior modification for classroom training, music fundamentals, vocal diction, music methods, trumpet techniques, conducting, composition, electronic music, clarinet performance techniques, and instrumental methods and research. “It was pervasive at that point in time,” says Peters.
Despite the broad support for PLATO within the School of Music, Peters did find that spending a large amount of one’s career on the system came at a cost. Like PLATO-using professors in other departments, Peters found that his chances at tenure were in jeopardy if all he did was work on PLATO. “I was racing around doing all this work, and I had some of the senior faculty in music education, they just said, ‘Look, this is great, you did some great work, but, it’s not going to get you tenure. If you want to get tenure, you have to write a book.’ ” So Peters went and wrote a textbook, twenty music compositions, and other publications. Of the School of Music’s tenure committee, Peters says, “I don’t know if they didn’t value PLATO, they just totally didn’t get it, they didn’t understand it, and they couldn’t—you know, a book, you can pick it up, you can weigh it and say, ‘Well that’s about heavy enough,’ but with PLATO, they just couldn’t get their mind around whether it was important or not. So I would not have gotten tenure at Illinois if I hadn’t written a textbook and some other publications.”
Basic Skills for Prison Inmates
The PLATO Corrections Project (PCP) began in 1974 after personnel from the Illinois Department of Corrections came to CERL for a demo. “They were very interested,” says Marty Siegel, “in doing a prison project with some federal funds from the Department of Justice. I told Frank Propst that if that project came into being, I was really interested in it, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you write a proposal.’ ” Siegel wrote the proposal, it got funded,
and the PLATO Prison Project was begun. Soon it was renamed PLATO Corrections Project (PCP) to better reflect the philosophical change taking place nationwide during the 1970s that prisons were correctional facilities.
PCP developed hundreds of lessons, mainly in basic skills, as well as an early computer-managed instruction (CMI) system, what would be called a “learning management system” today. “An instructor would actually set up a record,” says Siegel, “and assign a curriculum sequence to students. Eventually we moved into a kind of mastery-based learning system, where the instruction would be divided into instructional units, bounded with pre-tests and post-tests, and so it was quite a sophisticated system.”
The PCP project revealed interesting insights into the use of PLATO by its user population. “You couldn’t find,” says Siegel, “a more disadvantaged, disenfranchised, turned-off, uneducated group of people than the kind of people you found in prisons. And as you can imagine, survival in a prison means maintaining a kind of tough-guy image. If you are thought of as weak, bad things are likely to happen to you….And so typically what happens is, a lot of people will not even opt for educational classes because that’s seen as weak. Or if you’re sort of required to sit in an educational class in a prison, you’re likely to try to misbehave or be the class clown, or act in some way that shows your disinterest. Not because you really are, but because you can’t afford to be wrong in front of your peers. So when the teacher says, ‘Where does the comma go in this sentence?’ and you don’t know the answer to that, you say something that indicates you don’t need to—that that’s irrelevant, or those aren’t the words that someone would say, but it would be the equivalent of that sort of blowing it off. You would blow off the task in front of your fellow classmates. That’s the sort of environment that we were stepping into.”
