Article ID: CBB870556492

A Three-Person Teaching Machine Designed for Crisis: The Geromat III in Berlin and Ulm (2020)

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This is the first paper to discuss the Geromat III teaching machine developed at the Berlin Institute for Cybernetics in relationship to the Geromat III prototypes developed at Ulm School of Design in the 1960s. The Geromat III was an electro-mechanical teaching machine that could train up to three students at three separate multimedia consoles. The system required all learners to answer correctly in order to progress through the instructional program; if not, the students were required to speak to each other in order to reach agreement. The paper analyzes archival material and first-hand accounts with the Geromat III, as well as the social context of federal funding for research into computing and education in West Germany of the 1960s, in order to understand how this teaching machine, an early form of computer-aided instruction (CAI), came to be. The Geromat III, though utilized on a small scale, found an audience of enthusiastic supporters on the other side of the country, with artist-designers at the Ulm School of Design who created prototypes for consoles to be used with the system. While hands-on knowledge about the system was unavailable to the console designers, an ideological affinity between the Ulm School of Design and the Berlin Institute for Cybernetics bridged any technical gaps in knowledge; the resulting design prototypes, one for mass-production and one for DIY (do-it-yourself) construction, point to speculative futures for the system.

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Article E. Mori; S. Kelkar (2020) Introduction to the Special Issue on Interface Architects: The Evolution of Human–Computer Interaction. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (pp. 6-7). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB870556492/

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Authors & Contributors
Candace Robertson
Lachney, Michael
Miller, Haynes R.
Crooks, Roderic N.
Hof, Barbara
Aman Yadav
Concepts
Educational technology
Education
Computers and computing
Educational change
Teaching; pedagogy
Technology and society
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
United States
West Germany
Saudi Arabia
Paraguay
Australia
Israel
Institutions
One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
India Space Research Organization (ISRO)
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
Rockefeller Foundation
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
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