Speak & Spell: A History∠

Toys as Teaching Machines

The Speak & Spell – one of the most iconic toys of the 1980s – is a teaching machine.

By that, I don’t mean simply that it’s an electronic, educational device. It is that, sure.

The Speak & Spell is a teaching machine specifically in the tradition of B. F. Skinner, reflecting some of bothSkinner’s design principles and his theories of learning, decades older than the popular Texas Instrumentsdevice. Rather than selecting the correctly-spelled word in a multiple choice quiz, for the example, the Speak& Spell prompts the user to construct the response. It praises; it corrects.

In his "History of Teaching Machines," historian of psychology Ludy Benjamin writes that,

"A teaching machine is an automatic or self-controlling device that (a) presents a unit ofinformation (B. F. Skinner would say that the information must be new), (b) provides somemeans for the learner to respond to the information, and (c) provides feedback about thecorrectness of the learner’s responses."

The shared features in most definitions of teaching machines include automation, immediate feedback, andself-pacing. The Speak & Spell has all three, using “contingencies of reinforcement” to establish appropriatespelling behavior. (Some of its engineers thought it would be funny if the user received a raspberry or a funnycomment when they spelled a word wrong. But this idea was rejected as it would “reward” incorrectspelling.)

Like so much of education technology, the Speak & Spell takes a behaviorist approach to teaching andlearning.

That’s noteworthy, because I would argue that the Speak & Spell has profoundly shaped how we think aboutelectronic educational devices – what we expect these devices to do.

Mobile Computing and Ed-Tech: From Calculators to the Little Professor

Typically the history of the Speak & Spell isn’t traced through B. F. Skinner’s teaching machines but throughthe calculator. (That being said, Skinner had made significant in-roads into both the engineering crowd andthe popular consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s with his teaching machines.)

In 1967, engineers at Texas Instruments developed the first handheld electronic calculator. Thanks to anumber of technical developments (single chip microcomputers, LED and LCD, for example), these portablecomputing devices quickly got better and cheaper. In the early 1970s, calculators could cost several hundreddollars, but by the end of the decade, the price had come down to make them more affordable and morecommonplace.

And so, with some resistance and debate about their effect on learning, calculators began to enter theclassroom. A new ed-tech market.

In 1976, Texas Instruments introduced what it boasts was “the first electronic educational toy”: the LittleProfessor.

The Little Professor served as a reverse calculator, of sorts. Instead of plugging in a mathematical expressionin order to get an answer, the Little Professor provided the expression, and the user had to provide the answer– it is, as some have described it, an “instructional calculator.” According to Texas Instruments,

It functioned as a handheld drill-and-practice aid for basic math, and was designed to resemble awise and friendly owl. The Little Professor suggested problems to students and rewarded themwith a message on its display when they gave the correct answer.

Little Professor was priced to sell for under $20 and was an instant hit. Although production wasramped up, TI couldn’t make enough units to fill the orders for the Christmas season in 1976.Demand for 1977 was more than 1 million units.

The success of the Little Professor prompted Texas Instruments to brainstorm other possible electroniclearning products.

The Development of the Speak & Spell

It was Texas Instruments engineer Paul Breedlove who reportedly came up with the idea of a learning aid forspelling. (Interestingly, one of the very first patents for educational devices was awarded in 1866: “anapparatus for teaching spelling.”) Breedlove’s idea was to build upon bubble memory, another TI researcheffort, and as such it involved an impressive technical challenge: the device should be able to speak thespelling word out loud.

Research began in 1976 – a three-month feasibility study with a $25,000 budget and a team of four: PaulBreedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz.

(photo credits)

In a 2008 interview with Vintage Computing, Richard Wiggins described the early development process:

Initially, there were only a very few people involved. At the initial meeting in November, PaulBreedlove came over to the research Labs with Gene Frantz and Larry Brantingham from theConsumer Products Group. The result of that meeting was that I was to propose a technique forgenerating the speech in the product. The challenge was that it had to be solid state (no pullstrings!), cheap (meaning it used a low cost semiconductor technology), and the speech had to begood enough so that the user could understand the word out of context — a little bit harder thanusing a word in a sentence. Larry was a circuit designer and was tasked to determine if what Icame up with could be implemented in an integrated circuit. Larry and I spent time together

discussing various strategies, and Gene Frantz, who eventually became the project manager, keptthe overall design moving forward.

As the program moved forward during 1977, additional people kept being added to the project. Itwas amazing to me how many people eventually become involved. [There were] people workingon which spelling words to chose, what the product should look like, what it should be called,where it would be manufactured, and how it was to be marketed.

The original Speak and Spell was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1978. The 10“ x 7” orangeplastic device contained a library of several hundred “frequently misspelled words.” The machine would sayone out loud, and the user would type it via the pushbutton keyboard (later a membrane keyboard instead ofraised buttons). As the user typed, the letters would appear on a VFD screen (later LCD) – one form offeedback. (Thanks, Skinner!) From the press release, we can see the other form of feedback: “Right answersearn verbal and visual praise; wrong answers receive patient encouragement to try again. A number of gamesare offered to intrigue children of all ages.”

The toy had a suggested retail price of $50. (That would be now about $181, adjusted for inflation.)

A Speaking, Teaching Machine

The Speak & Spell was not the first talking toy. But it was, as Texas Instruments boasted in its CES pressrelease, the first with “no moving parts.” Other toys, such as Mattel’s Chatty Cathy, used pre-recorded voiceson phonograph or tape, typically triggered by a pull-string or similar mechanism. These broke easily, as anyparent would tell you. So “no moving parts” was a selling point for durability.

But to accomplish that with the Speak & Spell, Texas Instruments had to make an important engineeringbreakthrough in speech technology.

According to TI’s Richard Wiggins,

I promoted the choice of linear predictive coding to generate the speech signal from a smallamount of data. Today, the speech could easily be recorded and stored in large digital memorychips. But in 1976, memory chips were not capable of storing that much data. We consideredgenerating the speech from phonemes or sound fragments but the speech quality was notsufficient. A digital filter could be used and the time varying coefficients could be stored inmemory but the amount of computations involved seemed too great.

Also, some kind of speech elements shorter than words were considered, but it appeared that theamount of computer processing to prepare data to drive the speech synthesizer would be too timeconsuming, and the resulting system would be very complex. We needed something simple togenerate the speech sounds, and a preparation system for the data that wouldn’t be toocomplicated to execute.

The solution: the first linear predictive coding digital signal processor chip, the TMS5100. Each word wasrepresented by a series of phonemes. This speech data was stored in the device’s memory (on 2 128 kilobit

ROMs, at the time the largest capacity ROM in use); then when the Speak & Spell was told to say a word, thecommand was processed through a 4-bit microprocessor and speech synthesizer. A radio DJ from Dallas waschosen to record the speech sounds, thanks to his clear, monotone voice, and according to Texas Instruments,“it marked the first time the human vocal tract had been electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon.”

(photo credits)

“The Standard for Educational Toys”

The Speak & Spell was one of a trio of talking educational toys released by Texas Instruments that laterincluded Speak & Read and Speak & Math (both launched in 1980).

Speak & Spell was incredibly popular and was sold around the world, with cartridges that offered localizedversions of games and word libraries in both different accents (British English versus American English, forexample) and languages (Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, and German).

The Speak & Spell was re-designed several times (the last time in 1992 for the Spanish market only), andTexas Instruments insists, “the basic learning principles and design concepts remain the standard foreducational toys.”

But does the Speak & Spell teach?

According to research published in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies in 1982, usersexperienced a “significant increase in the spelling of words in the machine’s lexicon.” But that increase didn’t

stick. “This appeared to be only a transitory increase because spelling performance on these words began todrop to pre-machine exposure levels once the opportunity to use the machine was removed. No improvementwas observed in the spelling of words not in the machine’s lexicon.”

These aren’t uncommon findings, of course. Much of ed-tech is similarly ineffective.

Yet the Speak & Spell has become one of the most iconic pieces of education technology, referenced againand again in pop culture. The device appeared in Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and, most famously, in E.T. theExtra-Terrestrial.

E.T. used the Speak & Spell to “phone home,” but it doesn’t actually teach spelling.

Hacking the Speak & Spell

But E.T. used it to “phone home.” And that’s why, despite the model upon which the instruction wasdesigned and despite the lack of research to demonstrate it was truly an effective spelling aid, the Speak &Spell manages to break free of behaviorist teaching machines – because as E.T. demonstrated, the Speak &Spell is eminently hackable.

It can be dismantled and reprogrammed to do different things, to serve different purposes.

(photo credits)

The Speak & Spell is often used in “circuit bending,” for example, whereby the device’s normal functioningis disrupted and distorted to make new sounds by placing an alligator on a particular spot on the circuit board.From Casper Electronics (which offers detailed instructions on circuit bending):

“So, if the Speak & Spell was saying ‘Spell the word PONY’ and you activate the ‘hold’ effect inthe middle of ‘PONY’, it would sound like…..‘Spell the word POOOOOOOOOOONY’.” All ofthis has made the Speak & Spell a stock “instrument” in a lot of noise music.

Contrary to how many electronic devices are "closed" and constrained by design, Texas Instruments did notrestrict usage of the various language cartridges by region. And the company has not responded negatively tothose who “circuit bend” (or show others how to “circuit bend.”) That approach differs, it’s worth noting,from the one that TI took to lock down some of its other computing devices. In 2009, Texas Instruments fileda DMCA takedown request against programmers who’d posted instructions on how to “flash” a newoperating system onto Texas Instrument’s TI–83 series graphic calculator; that is, a way to make its devicesprogrammable beyond the TI software.

The Speak & Spell – its software and its hardware – remains (somewhat) “open.” That makes this particulardevice very different from much of current education technology – tools that are not hackable, not extensible,

not inspectable; tools that even if you buy, you don’t really “own” or control.

The Speak & Spell is a behaviorist teaching machine; but it retains for the user the capability to resist that.(Something that I'm sure B. F. Skinner would find quite distasteful.) First, of course, you have to unscrew theback cover, open it up, and hack...

Written by

Audrey Watters

Published 13 Jan 2015