Hunt, Peck & Read

Much waggish speculation has been devoted to how long it would take a dozen apes locked in a room with a dozen typewriters to reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare. The germ of thought back of this idea is that typewriters have an elemental fascination and pedagogical possibilities. Rutgers Psychology Professor Omar Khayyam Moore decided a few years ago to try teaching children to read using an electric typewriter.

In Moore's first experiment, a teacher sitting next to the child repeated the names of the letters as the child typed them at random. Soon the child was able to understand the relationship between the letters on the typewriter keys and their spoken names. Theoretically, simple words and short sentences were to follow. But teachers are human, and some of the children quickly learned how to drive them mad. One young boy, drunk with power, hit the asterisk key on his machine 75 times before the ill-starred teacher, who had been repeating "asterisk, asterisk, asterisk," finally cried uncle.

Transistorized Patience. To preserve the sanity of his teachers, and to carry his teaching system a big step forward, Moore presented the project to Thomas A. Edison Research Laboratory in West Orange, N.J. The firm finally developed a childproof teaching typewriter, complete with transistorized patience. This year the public schools of Freeport, Long Island, started testing the new machines by setting 22 kindergartners before computerized typewriters to learn to read, while another group of 22 children set about learning by conventional methods.

Each electronic learner had daily half-hour sessions in an isolation booth outfitted with one of the devices. First he was allowed to noodle on the keyboard, pressing keys at random; each time he hit a key, the corresponding letter materialized two ways: typed jumbo-size on the paper in the machine and spoken by a recorded voice. After two or three sessions, the recorded voice began to assume more authority: instead of repeating letters as they were struck, it started to dictate them to the pupil. All keys on the typewriter locked except for the demanded letter, and the child had no choice but to learn it by name.

Touch-Typing Too. Next step was whole words. The machine pointed a red arrow to the first letter of the word "tree," for example, while the child located the letter "t" on the typewriter. When the letter was successfully hunted and pecked, the recorded voice murmured a confirming "t," and the arrow moved on. To make the whole thing more like a game, a colored photo of a tree stayed lighted until the child spelled the word. Words led to sentences, sentences to whole stories, and the learning-to-read process was complete.

Two of the $30,000 Edison Responsive Environment machines were used in Freeport. It turned out that the typewriter-taught scholars were reading nearly two months sooner than their friends. A dividend: since the typewriter keys are coded in eight colors, and the children's fingernails are painted in corresponding colors in their initial sessions with the machine, the kids learn touch-typing while learning to read.

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