For such a smart guy, Roger C. Schank could use a few lessons in tact. During a two-hour conversation in his sprawling, 41st-floor home on Chicago's Gold Coast, the artificial-intelligence guru turned educator brands most "edutainment" software as "crap," blasts student-testing methods as "measuring all the wrong things," and chides school administrators for "taking 30 years to realize that overhead projectors could move from the bowling alley to the classroom."
Given such repartee, it would be easy to dismiss Schank, director of Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) and former chief of Yale University's Artificial Intelligence Project, as an academic gadfly. Mistake. Schank and his team of 150 scientists and graduate students at ILS are pursuing a serious mis- sion: using computers and multimedia software to revamp education and business training.
