LEARNING BY COMPUTER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31320, 16 March 1967, Page 15

LEARNING BY COMPUTER

(N.Z. Prett Attn.—Copyright) PALO ALTO

(California), March 14. The Radio Corporation of America entered the field of com-puter-based education yesterday in a big way, the “New York Times” news service reported.

The corporation’s president, Mr Robert W. Sarnoff, announced that the programme Is for individualised teaching in schools and colleges. A “partnership” between industry and education would make possible “both a rate of learning and a retention far greater than by any other known teaching technique,” he said. Opening in Palo Alto an electronics technology facility called R.C.A Instructional Systems, he said that the aim of the teaching system was “not to treat the mind as a storehouse of facts, but as an instrument for continuously

acquiring and employing knowledge. “This programme for individualised instruction,” Mr Sarnoff said, “can eventually bring us to the day of the gradeless classroom—a goal of considerable educational interest, and the happy dream of many students.” The system envisages individual elementary school students as sitting for up to 15 or 20 minutes a day at first, before a terminal with a keyboard and an electronic screen for drill in arithmetic, spelling and reading.

The curriculum setters will have supplied questions that have been entered in a disc storage unit of 7.25 million characters a unit. As a child signs on with his name and grade, questions appear before him on the screen, transmitted automatically from a nearby equipment room. Answers Back If he types an incorrect answer to an arithmetical problem, the machine reports back on the screen, “Wrong, try again.” Or the machine

may advise him: “Sorry, you took too long, try again.” In a drill in spelling, the pupil may be told to write the plural of baby. Or he may be asked to name the adverb in a sentence. “The new technology,” Mr Sarnoff said, “avoids the rigid system of learning by rote, substituting instead emphasis on the development of flexible skills that the modern student will need throughout life.” Palo Alto was chosen as the

site for the system’s deevlopment because of the presence of Stanford University, which Mr Sarnoff said had become “the seed bed of the aptlytermed ‘industrial revolution of American education.’” He said, R.C.A. would work closely with Stanford professors, headed by Dr. Patrick Suppes, director of the Stanford Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences.