For decades, teachers drilled American school children using flash cards that gave simple arithmetic problems. The advent of inexpensive electronic calculators in the 1970s made it possible to do much routine arithmetic automatically. To teach school children the meaning of basic operations, new dev

In the early 1960s, the Chicago firm of Playskool introduced this educational toy for children three to six years old, seeking to give them an early familiarity with numbers. It has two rows of relatively large rotating wooden rectangular blocks, each with a row of square rotating wooden blocks belo

During the late 1950s and 1960s, American scientists and educators proposed using machines for instruction. Teaching machines and related programmed textbooks used a careful sequence of questions for teaching. Jerome C. Meyer and later William R. Hafel, both of Sunnydale, California, believed that i

Introduced in mid-1976, the Little Professor is a non-printing electronic calculator modified to present simple arithmetic problems. A correct answer prompts another problem on the eight-digit display. An error delivers the message, "EEE." The colorful keyboard shows a professor with whiskers and gl

In this tour, take a close look at a life mask made of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and gain insight into his life during the Civil War. Pair this tour with a 3D tour of a life mask made in 1860 to consider the impact of the war on Lincoln. Life masks we

The focus of this online exhibition is the history of mathematics education in America.  Beginning with the advent of public education in the early nineteenth century and ending in the modern Information Age, students will learn how advances in technology and changes in education theory have