Previous part of our story at the turn of the 80s and 90s. By this time, the teachers had cooled somewhat towards computers. It was believed that only programmers really needed them. In many respects, this opinion was formed due to the fact that personal computers of that time were not sufficiently accessible in terms of user experience, and teachers did not always have the skills to adapt and apply them in the educational process.
When the potential of the PC was fully revealed, and they became clearer, more convenient and more attractive to the average person, the situation began to change, including in the field of educational software.
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"Iron" usability
It was Apple's first model with a SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface, pronounced "story") peripheral bus, thanks to which a variety of devices could be connected to the computer: from hard drives and drives to scanners and printers. Such ports can be seen on all Apple computers up to the iMac, which came out in 1998.
The idea of expanding user experience has become key to the Macintosh Plus. Then the company offered educational institutions discounts on a special model - Macintosh Plus Ed, and Steve Jobs actively supplied equipment to schools and universities, and in parallel with this - tax incentives for IT companies that are engaged in such projects.
A year after the Macintosh Plus, Apple released its first computer with a full color display, the Macintosh II. Engineers Michael Dhuey (Michael Dhuey) and Brian Berkeley (Brian Berkeley) began work on this model without the knowledge of Jobs. He was categorically against color Macintosh, not wanting to lose the elegance of a monochrome picture. Therefore, the project gained full support only with a change in company management and shook up the entire PC market.
He attracted not only with his 13-inch color screen and support for 16,7 million colors, but also with a modular architecture, an improved SCSI interface and a new NuBus bus that allowed you to change the set of hardware components (by the way, Steve was against this moment too).
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Despite the price tag of several thousand dollars, every year computers became closer to consumers, at least at the level of functions and capabilities. The only thing left to do was to create programs that would run on all this magnificent hardware.
Virtual teachers
The new computers sparked discussions about the problems of the education system as a whole. Some talked about the impossibility of reaching every student in a crowded classroom. Others calculated how much time it takes to conduct and check tests. Still others criticized textbooks and manuals, the updating of which cost a pretty penny and dragged on for years.
On the other hand, an "e-teacher" could deal with thousands of students at the same time, and each of them would receive 100% of his attention. Tests could be generated automatically, the training program could be updated at the push of a button. Not to mention the fact that this way it would be possible to present the material without subjective assessments and additions, always in the form and volume that was approved by the expert community.
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In the early 90s, school students were offered a new generation of educational software - they began to study algebra with и (PAT), and physics with . This software provided opportunities not only for assessing knowledge, but also for help in mastering the material from the curriculum. But adapting such products to educational processes was not so easy - the new software differed from its predecessor programs and required different teaching methods - the developers wanted the students not to memorize the material, but to understand it.
“All high school students use mathematics in everyday life, but few connect their experience with “school” mathematics,” the creators of PAT argued. “In our [virtual] classrooms, they work on mini-projects, for example, comparing forest growth rates over different periods. This task forces them to make predictions on the basis of existing data, teaches them to analyze relationships between sets, and to describe all phenomena in the language of mathematics.”
Software developers referred to proposals from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which in 1989 recommended not to torment students with hypothetical problems, but to form a practical approach to learning the subject. Traditionalists from education criticized such innovations, however, by 1995, comparative sections proved the effectiveness of integrating practical tasks - classes with new software increased the performance of schoolchildren on final testing by 15%.
But the main problem was not with what to teach, but with how the programmers of the early 90s were able to establish a dialogue between electronic teachers and their students?
human conversation
This became possible when academicians literally dismantled the mechanics of human dialogue into gears. In their writings, the developers mention (Jim Minstrell), who formed the aspect method of teaching, advances in cognitive psychology and the psychology of learning. These findings allowed them to design systems that, decades before smart chatbots, could support a “conversation” - give feedback as part of the learning process.
Thus, in AutoTutor, an electronic physics teacher, says it can “provide positive, negative, and neutral feedback, push the student to a fuller answer, help with word recall, give hints and additions, correct, answer questions, and summarize a topic.”
“AutoTutor offers a series of questions that can be answered in five to seven phrases,” said the creators of one of the systems for teaching physics. - First, users respond with one word or a couple of sentences. Program by adapting the problem statement. As a result, one question accounts for 50-200 dialogue lines.
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The developers of educational solutions not only provided them with mastery of school material - like "live" teachers, these systems roughly represented the level of knowledge of students. They "understand" when the user is thinking in the wrong direction or is one step away from the right answer.
“Teachers know how to pick up the right pace for their audience and find the right explanation if they see that the students have reached a dead end,” DIAGNOSER developers. — It is this ability that underlies the Minstrel aspect method (facet-based instruction). It is assumed that the students' answers are based on their deep ideas about a particular subject. The teacher must evoke the right view or get rid of the wrong one with the help of counterarguments or demonstration of contradictions.
Many of these programs (DIAGNOSER, Atlas, AutoTutor) are still working, having evolved over several generations. Others were reborn under new names - for example, an entire educational products for middle and high schools, colleges and universities. The question arises why these magnificent solutions have not yet replaced teachers?
The main reason is, of course, money and the complexity of long-term planning in terms of integrating such software into the educational process (taking into account the life cycle of the programs themselves). Therefore, electronic teachers and teachers today remain an extremely interesting addition that individual schools and universities can show off. On the other hand, the developments of the late 90s and early 2000s could not simply disappear. With such a technological base and the prospects that the Internet opened up, educational systems could only grow.
In the following years, classrooms lost their walls, and schoolchildren and students (almost) got rid of boring lectures. We will tell about how this happened in a new habratopic.
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Source: habr.com