The first piece of educational technology I remember using as a kid in the 1970s was the Little Professor, a hand-held device that looked like a calculator, but instead drilled you with math facts.
If you got the equation right, you got a new problem to solve. After the tenth question, the Professor would tell you how many you got correct.
There was no sound – no beeps or blips, no popping of electronic confetti to celebrate your success. And when you got a question wrong, the only feedback was a flashing “EEE” on its little red LED screen, and a chance to answer the question again.
I hated the Little Professor. It wasn’t exciting like my favorite game, Coleco’s Electronic Quarterback, and you couldn’t play it with your friends like Simon. In my 10-year-old mind, the Little Professor’s blinking EEE’s only reinforced my frustration with math. Nevertheless, the Little Professor sold 1 million units in 1977 and was a huge hit for its maker, Texas Instruments.
Along the way, the Little Professor became a sort of cultural touchstone – there’s a Little Professor in the Smithsonian – and is recognized today as one of the most successful early pieces of education technology. There’s even a Little Professor emulator in the Google Play store if you want to give it a go.
How Is The Ed Tech Of Yesterday Related To The Ed Tech Of Today?
Today’s ed tech looks nothing like the Little Professor. Touch screens have replaced push buttons, and LCDs long ago usurped LEDs. But beyond fancier interfaces and displays, is modern ed tech that different from vintage ed tech like The Little Professor, Alphie, or Speak & Spell?
Or, put slightly differently, in the evolution of educational technology, how much of the Little Professor’s DNA courses through the circuits of today’s AI-powered learning platforms?
Quite a bit, I was surprised to learn. From feedback mechanisms to motivational techniques, many of the core principles that were foundational to early ed tech are still central to today’s learning platforms.
Today’s ed tech looks nothing like the Little Professor. Touch screens have replaced push buttons, and LCDs long ago usurped LEDs. But beyond fancier interfaces and displays, is modern ed tech that different from vintage ed tech like The Little Professor, Alphie, or Speak & Spell?
One of the enduring aspects of educational technology – past and present – is its ability to drill students on fluency tasks, said Erik Harpstead, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who also teaches a course on educational gaming. While fluency isn’t the be-all-end-all, it should not be dismissed, either, he said.
“People often will rag on Math Blaster as just being a form of ‘drill and kill,’” he said. “But fluency practice can be an important kind of learning, and it’s something that some games are really good at. And so you’ll see a certain amount of DNA from games like Math Blaster in the more modern versions – there’s a lot of similar DNA there.”
Rewarding Learning With Candy
In fact, that DNA may stretch back all the way to the early 20th Century, via the granddaddy of all ed tech, the Pressey Teaching Machine.
Developed in 1925 by Sidney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio State University, the “machine” consisted of a metal box with four levers attached to a cylinder with a window through which students could read multiple-choice questions. Students would answer by pressing one of the machine’s four levers. If they were right, the machine would spit a piece of candy down a small chute as a reward. If they were wrong, they had to try again.
The idea is the same in many of today’s platforms – make learning interactive, and students will stay engaged and keep improving. For many reasons, Pressey’s machine never caught on, but Pressey stayed convinced that the future of education would lie in ed tech, writing in 1933 that “There must be an industrial revolution in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education.”
Sound familiar?
Motivating Students to use Ed Tech
Another piece of old ed tech DNA found in the genes of its modern counterparts is the idea that the tech must be motivating, or else kids won’t use it. That’s why Pressey fed students candy for each right answer, and why Blooket rewards students with virtual treasure chests.
Sunil Gunderia is the Chief Innovation Officer at Age of Learning, an ed tech company that developed ABCmouse and My Math Academy. He recalled that Mattel’s See ‘n Say offered him, as a young immigrant child, a playful and engaging way to connect with basic vocabulary while providing his first interactions with structured learning in English.
If developers swing too far onto the “fun” side of the equation, the game risks losing its educational value. Make it too educational, and kids won’t think it's fun. Getting this right is one of the hardest parts of ed tech development, and has sparked one of the biggest debates in the field.
“Products like See ‘N Say share a core goal with today’s learning platforms: they strive to engage learners through interaction and reward,” he said. “This shared thread underscores ed tech’s enduring focus on capturing attention and motivating learners.”
It’s the motivation aspect that seems to be the hardest nut to crack. Certainly, I never found the Little Professor’s flashing “EEE” to be particularly inspiring.
That’s the rub, said Ben Motz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University.
“The challenge is making a game that doesn’t feel like you’re infiltrating the gameplay with educational stuff,” he said. “It’s actually a really delicate balance to make a game that has real educational value, but that’s also fun to play.”
If developers swing too far onto the “fun” side of the equation, the game risks losing its educational value. Make it too educational, and kids won’t think it’s fun. Getting this right is one of the hardest parts of ed tech development, and has sparked one of the biggest debates in the field.
“A common criticism of educational technology is that developers too often pursue whatever’s hot and new and glitzy,” Motz said, “and not something that is going to solve a problem.”
Learning vs. Gaming
Often, the “problem” that ed tech is trying to solve is helping students understand the underlying concepts of whatever it is they are studying or trying to learn. Building an understanding of those base concepts is just as important as the tech’s engagement or gameplay, if not more.
“If they’re just trying to win, or if they’re just trying to rescue the princess or blast the numbers out of the sky, then they’re missing something important, which is to actually have them be thinking about the concepts,” Motz said.
Perhaps a good example of this is The Oregon Trail, one of the most beloved and popular computer games of all time – at least among Gen Xers. Ask pretty much anyone who came of age in the 1980’s or 1990’s and they’re likely to recall defending their wagons from bandits or how they died of dysentery along the trail.
But what were the game’s learning objectives? What was it the developers wanted students to learn while playing? What was the educational problem the game was trying to solve?
Despite its incredible popularity – Oregon Trail was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016 – the game had a major flaw that you won’t find in today’s ed tech: you could not save your progress, and the program knew nothing about what the user brought to the game.
Most people – myself included – would say Oregon Trail taught students about the hazardous journey from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City. And while that may be true, the game’s original teacher’s manual emphasized outcomes like learning to “critically interpret reading material,” and the ability to “compare things, ideas, events and situations on the basis of similarities and differences.” Perhaps this was done to broaden the appeal of the game beyond Social Studies teachers, said Erik Harpstead, the CMU professor. He added that he sees some ed tech companies do this today: Trying to make a product that can cover a wide range of a curriculum so that it has more use across classes.
'Motivate. Adapt. Ensure Outcomes.'
Despite its incredible popularity – Oregon Trail was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016 – the game had a major flaw that you won’t find in today’s ed tech: players could not save your progress, and the program knew nothing about what the student brought to the game.
No matter how many times you booted up Oregon Trail’s floppy disk, the game always started you off in Independence, Missouri, and you either played the game all the way through or quit when your time on the computer was up. Similarly, the Little Professor didn’t “remember” that I struggled with multiplication – it just threw random problems at me.
Today’s ed tech tailors its content and learning goals to the needs of its individual users. For many educators and developers, this is the most important step in ed tech’s evolution, and one that has helped fuel ed tech’s growth to a $142 billion dollar-a-year industry. Further, by using pretests, the technology can start new users off at a place that is right for their level of knowledge and skills.
Today’s ed tech tailors its content and learning goals to the needs of its individual users. For many educators and developers, this is the most important step in ed tech’s evolution, and one that has helped fuel ed tech’s growth to a $142 billion dollar-a-year industry.
“Older ed tech was often static, unable to adapt to a user’s abilities,” said Sunil Gunderia at Age of Learning. “Today’s technology allows us to personalize the experience, adjusting in real-time to provide each learner with the next activity they are ready to master.”
Today’s ed tech also often works across platforms – there’s an “interconnectedness” that allows student progress to be monitored over time through built-in assessments, allowing teachers or parents to determine how much learning has taken place. This is something that a lot of earlier ed tech could not do.
“Today, we embed game-based assessments, allowing learners to demonstrate proficiency – something that was completely absent before,” Sunil said. “By collecting this data, we can evaluate whether a student is truly learning. Allowing us to close the loop: Motivate. Adapt. Ensure outcomes.”
Can Tech Teach?
But perhaps one of the biggest advancements in ed tech over the decades hasn’t been a technology advancement at all, but rather a better understanding of its limitations. When radio was first introduced, it was seen as a way to democratize education and make it accessible to everyone. The same with television. Home computers, the Internet, MOOCs, and now AI have all had similar expectations heaped upon them, without ever quite living up to the hype – although the jury is still out on AI.
“One thing we learned is that technology doesn’t teach by itself,” said Mark Warschauer, Distinguished Professor of Education and the University of California at Irvine. “It is part of an infrastructure that includes curriculum, assessment, professional development for teachers, social support, and technical support.
“Now, highly motivated and skilled learners can teach themselves with technology, but most students need the structure and support of good teachers.”
Take that, Little Professor.
Kent Fischer
Communications Director
1 thought on “From Alphie to Zearn: The Evolution of Ed Tech”
Never knew about the MCQ grading machine made a century ago!