Teaching Machines: 1. — A Simple Model Available to Purchase

Viewing teaching as an industry, one might say that educational television and teaching machines are means of raising the teacher's productivity. Television widens greatly the range of the very able teacher, but it can make no real allowance for variations in pace between fust and slow learners. In the teaching machine, on the other hand, the pace of the machine is the pace of the student using it. It gives individual tuition in a real sense, taking much of the mechanical routine work of teaching from the teacher's hands so that he can spend his valuable time on the more essential aspects of his work. The first machine described here provides a useful and simple means of evaluating the principle of the teaching machine — if not the full possibilities of such a machine as the Autotutor II described overleaf