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- Dr. Frank Breit
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Frank Breit
FB: Mel’s Hotdogs was a very hot place and we ate lunch there a lot. I went back there recently when someone came into town. I hadn’t been there for several years and it’s still there. Mel is still behind the counter yelling at his workers.
LB: Now this goes on a little ways into your career but I don’t want to miss it. There was a health education program that we had in the Physical Education Department with one faculty member, Dr. Rita Bruce. She moved the program over to Science Education in the College of Education. I know you were a big help to her. Do you remember that?
FB: I taught a few course for her for a few years and that was hard as heck because the courses were all kind of content courses in physiology and various elements of health and it was really hard. I was like one day ahead of my students because I didn’t have the background in that area. The program ended up moving to another part of the campus.
LB: It moved to the College of Public Health where Dr. Bruce ended up writing most of the courses for the new College of Public Health. She knew how to get courses approved by the University’s committees and so forth. She became an associate dean in the College of Public Health before she retired. Dr. Bruce’s health education program flourished, but she kind of stepped out into another role and let others take it from there.
FB: I just remember how hard it was to learn physiology and teach it at the same time. These were all pretty sharp students in my classes.
LB: Yes. I use to borrow the skeleton that you had in the Science Education Program for my kinesiology course. You had all the money over there.
FB: Yes, right.
LB: But, let me see, the first remembrance I have of computers in the College of Education is Bill Engle. I think people were able to make their own computers after ordering the parts from Radio Shack?
FB: This was around 1978. Bill Engle, who’s a math educator and a good friend of mine, was always into electronics. He was a ham radio operator and he had those gadgets he would always purchase. I came to school one day and he had a copy of a magazine called Popular Electronics. I think that was what the magazine was called. On the cover was this big rectangular metal box, which was called a computer, the Altair. You could actually build it for $500 by buying a kit, putting it together and then actually have your own personal computer. He was all excited about it that he ordered it right away. He calls me up on a Saturday and had me come over and watch him putting it all together. It had no keyboard, no monitor, just the computer. You could push buttons up and down to enter a piece of program code. You’d push a button to run the program and different lights would light up and that would be the answer to what you had told it to do.
That is how it all started, teaching math education students how to program the Altair computer. One year later, I helped Bill set up a lab of five Radio Shack TSR 80s in a room on the third floor of the College of Education building. As interest increased, there was a need for someone else to teach computer based courses, so I got more involved. By 1980, we had enough courses developed and student interest that we were able to propose and get accepted, a new graduate program called Educational Technology.
LB: Now the schools had computers by then so teachers were eager to learn.
FB: The teachers were eager to learn. The irony is that because of lack of software the only things we could do with teachers when they came into the classroom was teach them how to program in BASIC, and that was because there’s a basic interpreter built into the computer. We would give workshops for teachers in schools around the area and if we did a good job there would be a certain number of teachers who could write simple BASIC programs that could print their names on the screen if they pushed a certain key. I convinced them that this was the way of the future, but I kept thinking how hard it was and I don’t want to do this.
LB: I’m just wondering at that time was there any idea of the comparison of the power of those computer’s capacity compared to what we’re using today?
FB: Well, the speed of Microsoft processor was probably back then about three mega hertz per second and now it’s like 3 billion mega hertz per second.
LB: Talk a bit about the Florida Center for Instructional Computing and how it got started. I saw that Bill Engle was the first director of the center and faculty like yourself, Bill, and Andrea Troutman were given the opportunity to change from your specialization to, in this case math education and in your case science education to computer education. Was any assistance provided or did you just do it?
FB: As a matter of fact, it was really hard on me because the year before we decided to create a Florida Center for Instructional Computing I took my sabbatical and we moved to Philadelphia for a year where my wife was getting her Ph.D. I hadn’t made that shift yet. I had that whole year when I could have taken courses in computer education and programming, but I missed it because I was still in Science Education. I came back from that year away and all of a sudden this new career is available. They said, “We’re going to start a program are you interested?” I answered, “Yes, I am. Do we have any money to go out and learn more about it or are we going to have to pick it up on our own?” Basically, we taught ourselves. I sure made a lot of mistakes in the beginning because we had very little guidance from the outside.