Customer Reviews

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book as a kid. It is a bit corny, but the message it relays about experiential and constructive learning is consistent with educational theory of the 90's. Knowledge is often best attained when the student (at whatever age) helps to construct it themselves rather than having it handed to them to memorize. Kids don't have to know this to enjoy the book! Highly recommended for grade school readers or students in instructional technology...

My reading of "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" back in the early 1960s eventually led me to becoming in a computer programmer. The book's "Homework Machine" was a computer and the all too cursory description given in the book on how it worked inspired me to go to the library and read through the entire section on computers.

Remember that this book was written in 1959 when computers were REAL computers, taking up an entire large room, with tape drives, blinking lights and lots of buttons. The idea of a computer so small (according to the book's illustration, about the size of a refrigerator) was science fiction at the time. I'm not sure how a kid today is going to react to the marvel of the computer in Danny Dunn's basement when they have one on their desk.

But the book holds up remarkably well. There is a nice reversal of the traditional sex roles of the time with Danny's best friend Joe writing poetry while his other best friend Irene is interested in science. The point made by author Jay Williams that computer don't "think" but merely process information we feed into them is just as true for today's PCs as it was for the IBM giants of yesteryear.

I read this ages ago as a kid. Oh, how I wished the homework machine were real!

I loved the Danny Dunn series of books. Every trip to the local library was filled with anticipation of a new, fantastic adventure. Great stuff.

OK, make that three raves. This is the perfect book for a kid in the 3/4 grade level who hates doing homework. It's worth the search, and is the one Danny Dunn that is probably worth keeping in one's adult library

Danny Dunn and his friends used a computer to do their homework. But, things didn't go good when Eddie Phillips (Snitcher) told their teacher, Miss Arnold, about the machine. Then she gave them high school homework. What will they do? Will they try to get back at Snitcher? To find out, read Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abraschkin.

I first read this book when I was in elementary school and it is very likely that it was the first one I read that featured people using computers. Even though it was first published in 1958, the plot elements involving the actions of computers have held up well, far better than in other stories.
Danny Dunn is a very bright boy in his early double-digit years and one of his major goals is to make the act of doing his homework easier. He has a friend Joe that writes poetry and in the opening of the book he meets Irene, the daughter of a professor and a girl very interested in science. Professor Bullfinch is the inventor of the computer and he trusts Danny to take care of it while he is away.
There are the usual adolescent rivalries between the children, yet Danny, Joe and Irene are able to program the computer to do their homework. When their teacher Miss Arnold learns what they are doing, she at first objects to their using a computer but then compensates by giving them extra-hard homework.
This is a book that generated an interest in computers in me that faded for a time but came back strong when it was possible for me to have my own. That spark became a passion and for years I have been teaching computer science at the college level. The book is also memorable for the portrayal of a young girl interested in science and a boy interested in writing. This was most unusual in 1958.

I agree with my colleague Fleety...this is one cool (if dated) book, complete with a sweet little romance and a moral (something about how computers are no substitutes for humans, which is a damn fine moral these days). This one's worth the search.

Ah, the Homework Machine. Who wouldn't want one? Danny and Joe meet Irene and the three of them immediately are up to scientific mischief, using Professor Bullfinch's new computer to do their homework for them. Great stuff.

Like the other reviewers, I read this book as a kid in 1959. Unlike them, I cannot recommend it. Although the characters are likeable, the story is crippled by the fact that the author is almost entirely clueless about computers. Of course in the Fifties, unlike now, this was true of most people, so the author's ignorance is understandable--but the many conceptual errors in the plot really hurt the storyline, and are likely to make young modern-day readers cringe with embarrassment--or simply discard the book, unfinished.