Curriculum History

Immediately following Field Day in 2017, Howard Bernstein WB2UZE and Richard Collins K2UPS got together at the Broadway Diner in Hicksville Long Island and decided to create a CW club in hopes of training a handful of new CW operators for the following year’s Field Day. They didn’t have a curriculum, or any instructors. Rich knew of the G4FON trainer, so they recruited a handful of local HAMs and began teaching classes on Zoom. Those were the Long Island CW Club’s (LICW) humble beginnings.

The G4FON trainer’s lowest character speed was 20 WPM. It was designed to teach with Farnsworth spacing. The club adopted 20/5 for initial learning. The trainer also had an embedded character sequence attributed to Koch, which began with the letters KMR. The club adopted the character sequence and divided the 40 characters into two classes, Beginners 1 and Beginners 2. Each instructor used their own teaching methods and before long, hundreds of students had learned Morse code.

In 2021 four recurring questions and observations led the club to take an introspective look at its curriculum and teaching methods:

• What was the origin of the sequence of characters commonly referred to as the Koch sequence and was this sequence optimum for initial learning of CW?
• Should we continue encouraging students to begin classes whenever they wished, or would students be better off waiting for beginners class to reset?
• Was 20/5 an optimum speed for initial learning of CW?
• Why weren’t more beginners progressing to intermediate?

We decided to look to the past for answers. We read many historical documents e.g., Biegel, Bourne, Goddard, Jost, Keller, Koch, Lipmann, Meyers, Mohapp, Morsh-Stannard, Ritter, Rutkowski, Sassaman, Sears, Seashore, Spragg, Taylor, Thurstone, US Army and Navy, NSA, Wundt, and many others of less relevance. Of particular interest were Ludwig Koch’s 1936 study from Leipzig Germany, and Donald Taylor’s 1943 doctoral thesis at Harvard.