Preliminary thoughts about a UNIversal TEAching Machine

Computer Aided Instruction (C. A. I.) promIses to make practical the goal of enabling each student to receive highly individualized instruction at some point in his educational career. C. A. I. has evolved over the last fifteen years from programmed instruction which itself has had a relatively short history as an educational procedure. Programmed instruction has not changed dramatically since the time of Pressey,! who in 1926 used it as a means of reinforcement in the educational process. Thirty years later Skinner2 saw the need for incorporating stimulus materials into a framework of instructional aids in order to provide education without a live teacher. However, the ultimate goal of a universal teaching machine which provides instruction to individuals in arbitrary fields has not yet been achieved. We consider a universal teaching machine to be one which may be converted to teach any subject by simply changing the program data base and which can adapt the instruction to the needs of each individual student. It is desirable that the transformation from the natural language of the subject to the machine language of the data base be somehow simple.