Little Professor is a backward-functioning calculator released in 1976 by Texas Instruments. Aimed at children between the ages of 5 and 9, it would generate unsolved expressions and prompt the user for the answers. Whereas a standard calculator would provide the answer to a mathematical expression entered by the user.
When the user turns the Little Professor on and selects a difficulty level, an incomplete equation such as “9 x 4 =” appears on the LED screen. The user has three chances to enter the correct number. If the answer is incorrect, the screen displays “EEE”. After the third wrong answer, the correct answer is displayed.
If the answer supplied is correct, it moves on to the next question. The Little Professor displays the number of correct first answers after each set of 10 questions.
During 1977, around one million children received a Little Professor. Today however, they are often collected by calculator collectors (yes, this is a real thing). As the worlds first electronic educational toy, it is a fairly sought-after product. While they may not hold much value, they are still a cool toy to own.
The second generation version had a few extra buttons above the numbers, these were ‘OFF’, ‘SET’ and ‘LEVEL’.
Other versions include a solar-powered Little Professor and an emulator version released in 2012 for Android.
Little Professor Commercial
Those with great memories may remember this 1978 commercial from Texas Instruments. It features both the Little Professor and the Dataman. The Dataman was fairly similar, however, it was aimed at children a little older and looked a little bit like a robot.
