A Machine on Every Desk

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Susan Berner, a business major from Strongsville, Ohio, knew when she entered Philadelphia's Drexel University that computers would play an important role in her college education. Like other entering freshmen, she had been informed that in addition to the first-year fees of about $9,000 for tuition, room and board, she would have to shell out $1,020 for an Apple Macintosh computer and a bundle of software. Indeed, when she arrived on the urban campus last month, dormitories, classrooms, offices and labs were already teeming with some 6,000 Macs.

Still, the pervasiveness of the computer revolution at Drexel was beyond even Berner's expectations: coin-operated modems in the library for telephone communications between computers; printer stations in the dorms; computer- designed flyers tacked to every bulletin board. And nobody had told her that two days after she picked up her Mac (one of 1,809 distributed to the freshman class), she would be tapping out her first English composition for a professor who refuses to read any paper that is not written on a word processor.

Drexel was not the first college to make personal computers mandatory; in 1982 Stevens Institute required its science students to buy their own PCs, and in 1983 Clarkson and Dallas Baptist extended the idea to include all incoming freshmen. Now computers are required or strongly recommended at more than a dozen schools, including Carnegie-Mellon, Colby, Dartmouth, Drew, Franklin and Marshall, Lehigh, LeTourneau and Sweet Briar. But none of these schools has integrated the machines into its curriculum as thoroughly as Drexel has. And none has been as dramatically transformed by computers as the Philadelphia school.

When the first 2,400 Macs arrived at Drexel in February 1984 and were distributed to freshmen and faculty, university officials noticed an immediate, if unanticipated, result: rather than studying for their upcoming exams, many of Drexel's 13,000 students were "Mac-ing around." Says Steve Weintraut, president of the campus computer users' group: "Everybody just barely made it through finals."

By the next semester, however, the novelty had worn off, and students were using the Macs for everything from planning diets to balancing equations. But it was the school's effective use of a $2.8 million grant from the Pew Memorial Trust for faculty computer training that really made the difference. "We knew that if anything was going to make this program succeed, it would be the Drexel faculty," says Bernard Sagik, vice president for academic affairs. His innovative solution: invite teachers to become their own software developers. Faculty members with good ideas for educational computer programs were paired off with crack student and professional programmers. Their joint efforts resulted in a library of nearly 100 original programs, including a handful of software gems.

Chemistry Professor Jim Friend, for example, created an electronic periodic table for use in his general chemistry classes. Another chemist, Allan Smith, designed a "molecular editor" that can display, rearrange and rotate crystal structures made up of as many as 99 atoms. Mathematician Bernard Kolman created a program that will solve complex matrix algebra problems and explain each step along the way. Electrical Engineer Banu Onaral developed a series of programs that generate wave forms on the screen and manipulate them according to the basic rules of signal processing. "These are very theoretical subjects that require some brain gymnastics to be understood," says Onaral. "The computer can help students visualize these abstract concepts."

The most enthusiastic fans of Drexel's computerization, however, come from the humanities, not the sciences. English Professor Valarie Arms, who has developed software to coax better writing out of fledgling scientists, reports that students in every subject are expressing themselves with more clarity and coherence. Psychologist Doug Chute uses the Mac to replace polygraph machines and other behavioral lab paraphernalia. No longer dependent on limited laboratory space and equipment, he can now assign individual research projects to 1,200 introductory-psych students a year. History Professor Eric Brose discovered that by displaying on a Mac the political boundaries and disarmament terms established by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, he was able to skip his usual map lecture and concentrate on the underlying causes of World War II. "I tell them to do the exercises at home," he says. "And when we come to class we discuss what might have been, or whether the French point of view was more realistic than the American. It is very effective."

There have been setbacks. Words and images on the oversize computer screens installed in the lecture halls were too dim to be seen with room lights on. When the lights were lowered, students could not take notes. Some of the more elaborate simulations created for physics and statistics proved to be more trouble than they were worth. And a few holdouts among the students and faculty are still using their unopened computer cartons as lamp tables, including one professor who says he will never use a machine that he cannot understand.

But overall, reports Joan McCord, a sociologist, "the impact on morale has been tremendous." McCord is conducting a five-year study of the effects of Drexel's computerization by measuring such intangibles as self-confidence and optimism about the future. Her samples show sharp increases for both students and faculty. "We're trying to be cool-headed about this," says Banu Onaral. "But in the hands of a professor who really believes, it seems the computer can do miracles."