Education technology has come a long way from the very first attempts a century ago. This week, we’ll explore the history of teaching machines.

Today we think nothing of seeing laptops and iPads in the classroom. But there have been attempts at creating so-called teaching machines since the early 20th Century. And it’s the history of those early teaching machines that Audrey Watters explores in her new book called “Teaching Machines – The History of Personalized Learning.”

In the past few years, machine learning algorithms have been used to automate the interpretation and analysis of clinical chemistry data in a variety of situations in the lab. In the September 2020 issue of the journal Clinical Chemistry, there is a paper on a machine learning approach for the automated interpretation of amino acid profiles in human plasma. The same issue contains an accompanying editorial titled “Machine Learning for the Biochemical Genetics Laboratory.” One of the authors of the editorial is Dr. Stephen Master, Chief of the Division of Laboratory Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Master is also an Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.

Okay, so we’ve done some deep dives into teaching machines and machine learning, let’s go for the hat trick and take on virtual reality. That’s the topic of today’s Academic Minute.

Photo courtesy of MIT Press.