June 1997 — Features

Print this article | Email this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

Computers in Education: A Brief History

In 1959, at the University of Illinois, Donald Bitier began PLATO, the first, large-scale project for the use of computers in education. The several thousand-terminal system served undergraduate education as well as elementary school reading, a community college in Urbana, and several campuses in Chicago.[7] Thus, the era of computers in education is little more than 35 years old.[8]

The Early Pioneers

At Dartmouth, in 1963, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz transformed the role of computers in education from primarily a research activity to an academic one. They did not like the idea that students had to stand in long lines with punch cards for batch processing. So they adopted the recently demonstrated concept of time-sharing that allowed many students to interact directly with the computer. The university developed the time-shared system and expanded it into a regional computing center for colleges and schools.[9] At the time, most programs were written in machine language or FORTRAN. Kemeny and Kurtz developed a new, easy-to-use language, called BASIC. It spread rapidly and was used for the creation of computer-based instructional materials for a wide variety of subjects and for all levels of education.

Computer-Assisted Instruction

In 1963, while at Stanford, Patrick Suppes and Richard Atkinson established a program of research and development on computer-assisted instruction in mathematics and reading. They sought to free students from the lock-step process of group-paced instruction and developed individualized, instructional strategies that allowed the learner to correct his responses through rapid feedback. The self-paced programs allowed a student to take an active role in the learning process. Mastery was obtained through drill-and-practice.[10]

Micro Worlds

In the early seventies at MIT, Seymour Papert set out to develop a new and different approach to computers in education. He developed a programming language, LOGO, to encourage rigorous thinking about mathematics.

He wanted it to be accessible to children and to be easy to express procedures for simple tasks like many non-numerical problems familiar to children. He used it to teach mathematics by teaching LOGO in a wide variety of interesting "micro world" environments such as music and physics. Papert insisted that we should not teach mathematics, but should teach children to be mathematicians. LOGO soon became the language of the elementary school computer literacy movement.[11]

Later, Papert extended LOGO to work with LEGO construction kits.