Ec S-1 Students Study Economics With a Computer

Computers are teaching economics to a group of summer school students. The economics department has developed a four hour course that mey be the fore-runner of longer courses to be offered as supplementary work next year in Economics 1.

The present course uses a teletype, which is just a typewriter connected to a computer, and an automatic slide screen. Blocks of text, tables and diagrams are flashed to the student on the screen. The teletype taps out accompanying question and problems.

After the student finishers reading a text on the screen, he presses a key on the teletype to signal that he is ready to continue. His mechanical teacher then fires a question at him and waits for a response. The correct answer typed back will elicit a "Good" or "That's fine" followed by more questions or new material on the slide screen. If the student's answer is incorrect he'll get a "No" with an explanation and perhaps a mild chiding, "What are you going to do when we get to the hard questions?"

Sometimes a question refers to a graph or a table, for example, "According to table 3..." The student can bring table 3 to the slide screen by typing out "Table 3."

The computer can be programmed to give a student extra help if he needs it. If the student misses a problem, the computer will give him several more just like it, until he gets right answers, before moving on to new material.

This step-by-step learning process can help a student pinpoint where he is having trouble.

Besides giving instruction, computers may soon be used by graduate students as scratch pads. Working on a teletype a student could climinate hours of tedious hand calculations.

Next week economics department chairman Otto Eckstein will meet with the leaders of this summer's experiment to discuss the first results. If the project has met with success, economics 1 may next year become the first Harvard course to offer instruction by computer.