Word: max
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although some 20 companies are at work designing teaching machines, and several are on the market in limited quantities, the Grolier Min-Max machine represents the first attempt to sell one to the mass market. Priced at $20, the Min-Max is by far the cheapest. After the first door-to-door push, Grolier will offer the machine to industry for technical job training, has 70 ex-school superintendents as salesmen to talk up its merits to school boards. For Grolier, second largest U.S. encyclopedia publisher (after Field Enterprises), the diversification into teaching machines is the next step...
Grolier's Min-Max is loaded with a "program" of information and questions and answers that instruct the student as he works. The first question appears in a window at the top of the box, and a blank space is provided in another window for the student to write out his answer. When he is finished, he inserts his pencil eraser in a vertical slot, moves the page up until the second question and the answer to the first appear in the window. The paper cannot be moved backward to find the answer first...
...Teachers? The Min-Max was invented by Albuquerque's Teaching Machines Inc.. a group of psychologists who already have programed, or composed, seven courses, ranging from elementary spelling to college statistics that are ready for sale by Grolier for $5 to $15 each. Programing is an outgrowth of psychological experiments with animals, which can be taught complicated tricks on a one-step-at-a-time basis if frequently rewarded. Harvard Psychologist B. Frederic Skinner, 56, is the leader in adapting animal conditioning techniques to teaching humans; most machine programing follows his basic research experiments on Harvard and Radcliffe...
Grolier's Min-Max will be the first full-scale commercial test of the teaching machine's appeal, and both industry and education will watch the results closely. Grolier hopes to sell $5,000,000 worth of Min-Max machines and programed courses in the first year, give a boost to Grolier profits ($2,100,000 in 1960's first half). If Grolier succeeds, the teaching-machine boom will...
Portrait of Max, by S. N. Behrman. A fond, endearing portrait of Sir Max Beerbohm, whom the author met in Rapallo during the sixth decade of that sempiternal Edwardian's self-declared...