Experts in a bottle? 100 years of the teaching machine

When he wasn't lecturing in psychology at Ohio State University, Sidney Pressey spent his down time building a machine that may one day replace him: a teaching machine. It was 1921 and the dawns of binary computing, early artificial intelligence and electronic displays had not yet broken. But Pressey’s machine was visionary and could mechanically present questions to students and capture their responses. It offered up a decisive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. But a teacherly nod, smile or follow-up question were beyond its powers. Soon after, Pressey added two further mechanisms: one that kept students on the same question until they found the correct answer and one that dispensed a sweet when they hit a winning streak. Almost 100 years and 10 breakthrough decades later, we will look at how those early efforts materialised into today’s $9 billion edtech industry. But we will also ponder why the robot is still not the dominant figure in a child’s education, and why the challen