Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Robert F. Tinker, PhD ’70

Education innovator was inspired by civil rights

Making science education accessible is Robert Tinker’s life work. As founder of the Concord Consortium, an educational research and development organization in Concord, Massachusetts, Tinker launched the Virtual High School with colleagues in 1996. VHS, the first large-scale project to create Internet-based courses at the pre-college level, is now a global leader in collaborative online education. He also pioneered the field of “probeware,” filling classrooms nationwide with inexpensive sensors designed to collect data in real time to help students understand science, math, and engineering concepts.

Tinker, who earned a BS from Swarthmore College near his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, in 1963, had originally planned to become a physicist. He began graduate work at Stanford, but both he and his wife, Barbara—his college sweetheart—soon felt impelled to relocate to Alabama and join the fight for civil rights.

“Doing esoteric research in a basement at Stanford made no sense in light of incredible injustice and violence in the South,” he says. Tinker sped through his physics master’s in one year and set off for historically black Stillman College in Tuscaloosa. From 1964 to 1966, the couple taught at Stillman, marching with Martin Luther King in Selma and, through a grant from the Ford Foundation, recruiting talented instructors to teach at black colleges.

Tinker developed creative teaching methods in light of Stillman’s limited resources. He purchased Slinkys, Tesla coils, lenses, and prisms—interactive devices to intrigue any curious mind—and he showed students the connections between the abstract equations of physics and basic concepts observed through hands-on experiments. His efforts were successful, and some of his students pursued graduate studies at prestigious universities.

He enrolled at MIT with the goal of making science teaching more effective. “MIT was an obvious choice,” he says. “Its physics department was the center of science education reform.”

Tinker earned his PhD in 1970. He found inspiration in the Project Lab, headed by John G. King ’50, where students studied observable phenomena such as the sound of paper crumpling. Tinker developed tools to measure things like speed, to increase the range of experiments students could conduct on their own.

In 1979, he joined TERC, an organization founded by MIT physicists to improve math and science education. There, he helped launch Kidnet, the first online network connecting student scientists worldwide. He founded the Concord Consortium in 1994. His many honors include the 1990 Computerworld Smithsonian Award and the 2003 World Technology Award in Education.

Tinker and his wife live in Amherst, where he develops educational software—even in his spare time.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI.

“This is a profound moment in the history of technology,” says Mustafa Suleyman.

What to know about this autumn’s covid vaccines

New variants will pose a challenge, but early signs suggest the shots will still boost antibody responses.

Human-plus-AI solutions mitigate security threats

With the right human oversight, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence can help keep business and customer data secure

Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation

From million-dollar slide shows to Steve Jobs’s introduction of the iPhone, a bit of show business never hurt plain old business.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.