REVIEW 2 major objections 3 minor 9 references
Clickers in the '60s at a TYC?
T0 review · 2 major / 3 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Foothill College operated a 240-seat EDEX student-response system in 1965, a direct forerunner of modern clickers.
desk verdict A charming archival note on an early response system at Foothill, but the abstract overstates the hardware as a computer and the evidence is thin; fine as a footnote, not peer-review material. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The EDEX system itself is the central object: a networked student-response apparatus with four multiple-choice buttons at each seat, an instructor console with response meters, and optional recording for individual answers and attendance. It is the physical installation whose existence and deployment carry the paper's historical argument, along with the Push-Button Forum lecture hall that housed it and the contemporaneous newspaper and journal documents that describe it.
What would settle it
A purchase order, maintenance log, yearbook photo, or a retired faculty member's recollection showing that the EDEX system was not actually installed in the 240-seat hall, or conversely showing it was actively used for years, would settle the claim. Checking the room's original construction plans and campus archives for EDEX-specific records would also test it.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that Foothill College had a functioning EDEX student-response system in its new Push-Button Forum building by October 1965. The system, built by Edex Teaching Machines, a company founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Eugene Kleiner, consisted of four-button response stations at each seat, networked to an instructor's station with meters showing the percentage of students choosing each option. Associated recording devices could track individual answers and, with a seating chart, serve for grading and attendance. The paper shows that this installation is a direct forerunner of modern clickers and that a community college, not a research university, was at the leading edge of this teaching innovation. The author also claims, based on the absence of faculty memory and an analogy to the short-lived Foucault pendulum, that the system did not have a lasting pedagogical impact.
Load-bearing premise
The historical claim rests on the accuracy of a 1965 student newspaper article and a 1966 article by a Fine Arts instructor, both secondary and celebratory in nature, with no cross-verification against purchase records, maintenance logs, or oral histories from faculty who taught in the room.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- If the paper is right, community colleges were early adopters of classroom response technology, decades before modern clickers became common.
- The pedagogical questions EDEX raised - whether immediate, aggregated student responses improve teaching and learning - are the same questions driving clicker research today.
- The rise and fall of EDEX illustrates how maintenance costs and institutional memory loss can erase even high-profile teaching innovations.
- The paper's method of mining student newspapers and instructional journals can uncover similar forgotten educational-technology histories at other institutions.
Reading between the lines
- The EDEX's four-button design with aggregated displays anticipates modern clicker practice but also prefigures ongoing debates about anonymous versus tracked participation, forced choice, and whether response data should affect grades.
- The lack of faculty recollection may be skewed: if the system was used mainly for a short window in the late 1960s and the relevant instructors have since retired or passed away, absence of memory is weak evidence of non-use.
- A testable extension would be to search other community-college newspapers and ERIC documents from 1963 to 1970 for similar instant-response installations, to see whether Foothill was an isolated case or part of a broader movement.
- The paper implicitly suggests that innovations at two-year colleges are often under-documented; a systematic survey of existing ERIC reports could quantify how widespread these early response systems were.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This short historical note reports that Foothill College installed an EDEX student response system in a 240-seat lecture hall in the mid-1960s, with response buttons at each seat and meters at the instructor's station. The author draws on a 1965 student newspaper article, a 1966 article by a Fine Arts instructor, and several ERIC documents to describe the system and its use at other community colleges. The paper also speculates, based on the lack of faculty recollections and a comparison with a short-lived Foucault pendulum on campus, that the EDEX system had little lasting impact at Foothill.
Significance. If accurate, this note provides a documented early instance of classroom response technology at a two-year college, supporting the broader narrative that such institutions were early adopters of instructional innovation. The paper is transparent about its evidence base, cites identifiable primary and secondary sources, and explicitly hedges its speculative conclusions. Its main value is as a well-sourced anecdote that could motivate further archival work. The central existence claim is plausible, but the manuscript's headline wording about a 'computer' overstates the technology described in the body.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract and first paragraph] The central claim that the EDEX system was 'networked to a computer at the instructor's section' is contradicted by the body's own description: the 'fundamentals of the EDEX system' paragraph describes 'meters at the instructor's station' and 'associated recording devices,' with no mention of a computer. EDEX systems of this period were electromechanical response analyzers, not general-purpose computers. Because this wording appears in the abstract and the paper's opening sentence, it is load-bearing for the paper's headline claim and should be corrected to something like 'networked to an instructor's console' or 'response analyzer.'
- [Full text, 'Did the EDEX system make an impact at Foothill?' paragraph] The evidence for the existence claim rests primarily on two contemporary but celebratory sources (refs. 4 and 5), and the author acknowledges only a 'quick Google search' in the abstract. The absence of retired faculty recollections is repeatedly invoked as evidence of non-use, but as the author notes, this could be an artifact of memory loss or limited outreach. The manuscript should therefore state explicitly that the existence claim is 'as reported in contemporary sources' rather than independently verified, and that the non-use conclusion is speculative. This would not weaken the note's value but would align its claims with the actual evidence.
minor comments (3)
- [Full text, 'The fundamentals of the EDEX system' paragraph] The phrase 'multiple-choice buttons at each seat' is slightly imprecise; the body correctly notes the four response buttons, so consider writing 'response buttons' or 'four-button response stations' to avoid implying a larger set of choices.
- [References, ref. 3] The New York Times paid death notice for Eugene Kleiner is an indirect source for the founding of Edex Teaching Machines; citing a source that directly discusses Edex's history would strengthen the claim about the company's origin.
- [Full text, final paragraph] The comparison between the EDEX system and the Foucault pendulum is presented as an analogy, but the sentence 'perhaps our EDEX system met the same fate' could be read as implying parallel evidence; adding a phrase such as 'by analogy' or 'it is possible that' would keep the speculation clearly marked.
Circularity Check
No circularity: the paper is a historical report based on external archival sources, with no fitted inputs or self-referential derivations.
full rationale
The paper makes no derivational or predictive claims; it is a historical narrative reporting the existence and characteristics of a 1960s EDEX student-response system at Foothill College. The central claim is supported by external sources: the student newspaper article (ref. 4), Quirke's 1966 article (ref. 5), ERIC documents (refs. 1, 7), and other contemporary references. There is no parameter fitted to data and no quantity derived from another quantity by construction. The author explicitly notes a limitation and uncertainty about the system's impact: 'Despite a plea to our retirees association, I could not find a faculty member who used it to teach. While this may speak to the survival rates of teachers who were active in the 1960s, I also suspect that the system was not in use for long.' This is an honest acknowledgment of incomplete evidence, not a circular step. The skeptic's concern that 'networked to a computer' may overstate the analog EDEX hardware is a factual-accuracy issue, not circularity: the claim is not being made true by definition or by self-citation. The paper's conclusions are therefore self-contained in the sense that they rest on cited external evidence and explicitly stated reasoning, with no input that is silently assumed to be the output.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (2)
- domain assumption The 1965 Foothill Sentinel article and Quirke's 1966 paper accurately describe the EDEX installation.
- domain assumption The absence of faculty recollections of using the EDEX system indicates that it was not used for long.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Clickers in the '60s at a TYC?." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/SRWSKHMY
@misc{pith2026250204335,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Clickers in the '60s at a TYC?},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/SRWSKHMY}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2502.04335}
}
read the original abstract
At an AAPT conference years ago, a person noticed my badge, exclaiming "I always wanted to work at Foothill College!" They told me that in the 1960s, Foothill had a lecture hall where students as a class could give immediate feedback to their instructors via buttons at their seats, a forerunner to modern clicker systems. Intrigued, I later did a quick Google search and discovered that Foothill had an EDEX system in a 240-person lecture hall, which featured multiple-choice buttons at each seat that were networked to a computer at the instructor's section. This fact got tucked away, and I didn't think about it again until a recent hiring interview when a candidate from an R1 commented how TYCs were at the forefront of innovations in teaching. I remembered the EDEX system, and it reignited my curiosity.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
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[1]
The use of immediate response systems in junior college,
D. Boardman, “The use of immediate response systems in junior college,” ERIC ED019057, 7–12 (1968), https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED019057.pdf
work page 1968
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[2]
New resources for the school library materials centers
C. I. Whitenack, “New resources for the school library materials centers” (1963), https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/1583
work page 1963
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[3]
Paid notice: Deaths Kleiner, Eugene,
“Paid notice: Deaths Kleiner, Eugene,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 2003, Sect, B, p. 9, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/ classified/paid-notice-deaths-kleiner-eugene.html
work page 2003
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[4]
‘Push-button’ Forum Building to be completely equipped by mid-October,
“‘Push-button’ Forum Building to be completely equipped by mid-October,” Foothill Sentinel, Oct. 1, 1965, p. 4, https://distarch.fhda.edu/s/primary/media/7384
work page 1965
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[5]
The Moon and grass roots: A reaction to the comprehensive problem of media in art education,
L. Quirke, “The Moon and grass roots: A reaction to the comprehensive problem of media in art education,” Art Educ. 19, 15–19 (1966)
work page 1966
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[6]
B. L. Johnson, Islands of Innovation Expanding: Changes in the Community College, 1st ed. (Glencoe, Toronto, 1969), pp. 147–148
work page 1969
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[7]
P . H. Phillips, “Innovation in practice – The instant student response system with emphasis on Mount San Jacinto College,” ERIC ED019061, 7–9 (1968), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED019061.pdf
work page 1968
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[8]
Newscan: School for grease monkeys,
“Newscan: School for grease monkeys,” Elem. Electron. 6, 22–23 (1968)
work page 1968
Show all 9 references
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[9]
What’s a pit with no pendulum,
“What’s a pit with no pendulum,” Foothill Sentinel, May 28, 1965, p. 6, https://distarch.fhda.edu/s/primary/media/7378
1965
Reviewed August 10, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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