The New B.M.O.C.s: Big Machines on Campus

For years U.S. educators have touted the potentialities of the computer as a teaching tool. Dartmouth Mathematician John G. Kemeny contends that "the computer revolution will be just as significant in education as the industrial revolution." Now, computers have arrived on many campuses for programmed instruction, the solving of intricate problems by students, and the simulation of real-life situations in computer-controlled "games." M.I.T.'s civil engineering department is so enthusiastic over computer-aided instruction that it divides history into "B.C." and "A.C." -- before and after computers.

Because "computing is becoming al most as much a part of our working life as arithmetic or driving a car," the Pres ident's Science Advisory Committee has urged colleges to spend $400 million a year on computer instruction by 1971. It wants the Federal Government to help by sharing the cost of acquiring and operating the big machines.

For Modern Man. The most common classroom use of the computer is to take over time-consuming drill in the basic definitions and concepts of a discipline. At the two-year-old Irvine campus of the University of California, which bills itself as "designed for the modern man," 17 courses are partly taught by computer. In Geography I, for example, the machine leads students through such questions as: "How does geography's focus differ from that of the other social sciences?" (Correct answer: "Geography is interested in the spatial impact of all categories of human behavior, whereas other disciplines tend to focus upon a single category.") If the student respends with any or all of the key phrases in the answer, the computer replies "good," or "excellent," and proceeds to the next question.

Harvard can operate one of five major computers from 50 keyboards around campus and is putting another 25 in student dormitories starting next month. One result will be to allow economics students to pretend that they manage a business firm; as they make decisions on wages, prices and products, the computer will monitor their profits--or losses. The University of Michigan uses computers in 150 courses, ranging from literature to political science, but mostly in engineering. More than 90% of the undergraduates at M.I.T., where 150 remote computer consoles are available, regularly use computers. Like the system at such other schools as Caltech, Dartmouth and Carnegie Tech, much of M.I.T.'s computer activity involves students' processing individual research data on the machines. At Texas A. & M., students drop their computer data at a window, walk half a block to find the answers waiting on a table--and find the process so pleasant that they dub these evening sessions "happy hours."

Predicting Peace. Individual projects include the expected in civil engineering: the design of 20-story buildings at M.I.T., where, before the computer, students labored over plans for two-story structures. A music student at Carnegie Tech composed a musical score by computer; after its performance by a chamber-music society, critics called it "flat but interesting." Art students at Harvard create modern abstractions by using a computer to scan a conventional scene, then program it to delete parts of the picture. Two M.I.T. political science students fed 300 variables from two dozen small wars into computers to predict the outcome of the Viet Nam war. Their less than sensational finding: if both sides follow present tactics, the war will move gradually toward settlement.

The main value in such work, some computer enthusiasts say, is that it promotes logic. "You can't program a problem unless you understand it and think clearly," says Lafayette College's Computer Director James Schwar. Most students cozy up to their computers. "They have no fear of them," explains Harvard Linguistics and Mathematics Professor Anthony Oettinger. "The problem is to keep them from getting addicted."

Go to Sleep. A few students complain that the computer is too inflexible a taskmaster. Asked in a programmed geography course how she would use a vacant lot in downtown Chicago, Irvine Drama Student Tana Shattuck proposed a new musical theater for the space. "The computer answered, 'You need more sleep,' " she recalls. "But I wish I could have talked with it about my idea. It was programmed for a certain thing--but I'm not."

Cost is still the biggest problem. Carnegie Tech spends $3,000,000 a year just to operate its three-computer Compcenter, which will add a fourth computer and employ 14 full-time professors next fall--partly by courtesy of a $1,000,000 gift from Richard K. Mellon. With 43 remote stations, Dartmouth's $2,500,000 facility pegs the cost for each second of student use at 70. Though appreciative of vast federal help in building computer facilities for Government research, college administrators voice a universal complaint--Government auditors do not allow charges for student use of the machines.

The President's committee estimates that 75% of all U.S. undergraduates are enrolled in courses in which a computer would be "very useful"--yet less than 5% of the students have "adequate" access to such machines. A recent survey by College Management magazine snowed that more than half of U.S. colleges (but only 12% of the universities) have no access to computers at all; only 16% of those that do are using the new, more practical, "third generation" computers. If the computer is really going to revolutionize education, the colleges are going to have to develop more flexible and sophisticated approaches to programmed instruction--and the Federal Government is going to have to decide whether it wants to put its money behind the computer as a teaching as well as a research tool.

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