Patrick Suppes





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About Patrick Suppes
This is the beginning of a document about the Pioneer. In general, we are interested in two types of information:


 * General information about the pioneer.
 * Specific, personal stories drawn from your experiences in interacting with the pioneer or in interacting with others who have personal knowledge about the pioneer. Help the reader gain insight into the pioneer as a human being, a pioneer, and a leader dedicated to improving informal and formal education.

A Stanford University Website contains considerable detailed information about Suppes. There, his Intellectual Autobiography shows his deep contributions to many different academic fields.

The following quote from the Wikipedia mentions his early work with computer assisted instruction:


 * Patrick Colonel Suppes (b. 1922, Tulsa, OK) is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to philosophy of science, theory of measurement, foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology, and educational technology. Suppes initially graduated in meteorology from the University of Chicago, and was stationed at the Solomon Islands during WWII. After the war, he received a PhD degree from Columbia University, where he was a student of Ernest Nagel. In 1952 he went to Stanford University, and from 1959 to 1992 he was the director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (IMSSS). He is now the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford.


 * In the 1960s, Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson (the future president of the University of California) conducted experiments in using computers to teach math and reading to schoolchildren in the Palo Alto area. Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth and Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC, now named Pearson Education Technologies) is an indirect descendant of those early experiments.


 * In 1965 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences for his work on mathematical psychology. In 1990, Suppes was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science by President George H. W. Bush. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is the laureate of the 2003 Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science.

Within the field of computers in education, Suppes is known for his pioneering work in computer assisted instruction and the establishment of the Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC). Evidently legal issues arose about sho was responsible for what. Quoting from a Supreme Court of New Jersey 1992 decision:


 * CCC is in large measure the creation of Dr. Patrick Suppes, formerly of Stanford University, who spent over two decades researching and developing the CCC system. Except in the Northeast, CCC markets, distributes, and sells its products directly to educational institutions throughout the United States. 2 Over the past fifteen years, CCC has developed a distribution arrangement in the Northeast with Phyllis Kaminer (Kaminer), the President and CEO of ISI. Evidently, Kaminer developed some expertise in the field of education and computers, and, in 1972, became associated with a company known as Educomp of Connecticut. In her position at Educomp of Connecticut, Kaminer developed a relationship with CCC. Following Educomp of Connecticut's refusal to make an arrangement with CCC for the promotion of CCC products, Kaminer left Educomp of Connecticut and sought her own arrangement with CCC.

1995 interview of Dale LaFrenz, one of the founders of MECC:


 * We called John Kemeny [in 1963] at Dartmouth who was the head of the project and later to become president of the University. We told him what we wanted and he said, "We've got this huge GE computer here and this basic time-sharing system and if you can get here you can use it free." By "get there" he meant if we could pay for the telephone connection to get there. That meant we had to face telephone charges. Since they had a GE computer we went to the GE Foundation and we asked for a $5,000 grant -- $5,000 being a lot of long distance phone calls in those days -- and, we bought one model 33 teletype and one acoustic coupler. The rest of the money we spent on telephone charges to get back and forth to New Hampshire. We put the teletypewriter in the classroom. That's really where the whole computer in the classroom started. '''There was nowhere else in the country that was doing what we were implementing. There was one other project that was somewhat similar and that was at Stanford University. The project was headed by a guy named Pat Suppes. The project ultimately became the company which is now known as CCC or Computer Curriculum Corporation. Suppes, Max Jerman, and Dick Atkinson, had -- I think they got federal money to buy -- a time-sharing computer and put it in an elementary school in California. They put 25 model 33 teletypes in the room and hooked those teletypes directly -- not through time-sharing -- but directly into that computer -- an internal time-sharing because it was an on-site computer -- and the 25 kids would come in and do their drill and practice arithmetic and drill and practice reading on this machine.

'''

Questions and Answers
This is an "Up close and personal" section. It includes both questions directed to the Pioneer if he or she is still available to answer questions, and personal stories contributes by friends and acquaintances. If it is appropriate, please include the following question submitted by Dave Moursund. Remember, this is a question to the Pioneer, not to the person writing about the Pioneer.

Q. Drawing upon your years of experience in the field of education, what do you think are some of the very best ways to improve our current informal and formal educational systems?

A. (Response not yet provided.)

Up Close and Personal
Comment by Dave Moursund. When I was first getting involved in the field of computers in education, Pat Suppes had already made major contributions to the field. I remember being particularly impressed by his work in computer assisted instruction that eventually led to the founding of the Computer Curriculum Corporation.

In those days, I was suspicious of CAL. I wondered about the feasibility and appropriateness of making use of computer systems that could solve the types of problems it was teaching the students to solve by paper and pencil methods. However, I was impressed by the underlying research and the ongoing formative evaluation research in Suppes' work. It is a model of good work that remained firmly fixed in my mind.

Comment by (insert name).

Patrick Suppes' Past & Current Insights
Here, we want to capture one or both of the following:


 * A section written by the pioneer if he/she is still with us and is able and willing to write. We are interested in personal insights, retrospective analysis and comments, suggestions to the world of education, and so on.
 * Material similar to (1) above, but written by the pioneer in the past.