Early Attempts to Replace Teachers with Games

The current push to bring digital games into school is, strictly speaking, not the first, nor even the second time that educators have pushed for individualized instruction via machines. But it is decidedly the most nuanced, humanistic, and thoughtful. The first actually took place in the 1950s and early 1960s, when a small group of educational psychologists proposed doing away with teachers altogether and replacing them with self-paced, preprogrammed instruction on so-called "teaching machin...

 Teacherbots

Another class of AI products that we can expect will be teaching machines, "teacherbots." These machines will adapt to the intelligence, knowledge, interest and curiosity levels of individual users. Human students will be able to learn at their own individual rates, instead of the incredibly clumsy schooling methods we use now. In today’s schools, a single human teacher attempts to educate a few dozen students simultaneously, pitching the intellectual level of the presentation at the middle a...