How to Learn Morse

Learning to hear letters in morse code requires practice at auditory distinction well suited to mechanical instruction. However, the obsolescence of the task has prevented ongoing investment in morse teaching technology. Could this inattention make learning morse an excellent testbed for advanced learning mechanisms?

I have installed a plugin version of this teaching machine on this server. I will improve this as I learn more about teaching in this class. See About MorseTeacher Plugin

Preliminary testing shows that the new plugin works in chrome but not firefox or safari. Expect v0.1.1 soon.

The Morse Code Teaching Machine as originally written already employs some sophistication enabled on small computers by the restricted nature of the domain.

Confusion resistent sequence of material

Immediate positive feedback

Continuous model of profficency

Adaptive to learning rate

Visualized progress between sessions

The machine has been available for download for fifteen years and by mail before that. Students have succeeded alone. However advice outside of that provided by the machine is often of great help. webpage

This conversation is from a couple rounds of email with Jim Wilson, the author of the pc and multimedia versions.

I tried it. After a few false starts, I got it kinda working.

It is pretty minimal but it will save state in browser localStorage and can have its letter introduction sequence backed up by retrieving earlier saves from wiki's version history.

Hm... Is that creeping featurism? Or was your earlier assertion about always starting from scratch a mere rationalization because saving state was darn near impossible. I can't tell it hurts anything, but I haven't read all that teaching theory you have.

It was mostly rationalization, I think.

Now I get the memory for free so I'm inclined to use it. I'm inclined to introduce new letters faster because it is easy to backup if practice gets too hard.

Or you can double-click to edit the teacher's state, including the morse alphabet.

Only I miss a way to pause the program when you need to go to the bathroom.

If you click out of the text field it will stop. The cmd/alt-s key also stops.

It looks like you can give any wrong answer and she stops. That worked well enough until it sent an 8, and I was somehow absolutely convinced it sent a 7.

I haven't coded the part where it tells you what you are missing. It might be nice if it spoke the character instead of typing it for you. Right now it just waits and waits. cmd/alt-s will get it to give up waiting.

To get it unstuck I had to type all the possibilities until I passed 9. Resending after a bogus answer might help, but then let me use the spacebar to answer the phone.

Ah, yes, space bar could be a good pause too. I'll add that for legacy compatibility.

Source is online. github

Looks pretty cool, though.

Here we will collect ideas that could be applied to a modern implementation of which the specific training method of the original machine is only a part.

Feed Forward especially when introducing new letters