How neurodivergent students built a replica of ENIAC, the world’s first electronic computer
Thomas Burick of the PSA Academy Arizona and students built a 500-sq.ft. replica, down to hundreds of chicken knobs.
Thomas Burick, an educator at PSA Academy Arizona led his group of neurodivergent students in building a full-scale, immersive replica of the ENIAC computer, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer. The ambitious 500-square-foot project, built in the school gymnasium, leveraged the unique strengths of the neurodivergent students, resulting in a highly accurate, one-to-one recreation. The construction, which involved over 23,000 hours of student labor, was driven by a “magic formula” for engagement: providing young people with “work that matters” that enabled them to make a mark in history. The finished replica, coinciding with ENIAC’s 80th anniversary, has impressed historians, one of whom said “I stepped back and remembered: ‘this was built by kids.’”
This project was featured in the “Over the Top” section of Make: V97 – the last page of the current issue and was based on this interview, which I did in February.
Dale: I am very interested in the kind of students that you’re serving, particularly those who don’t fit into the normal academic program and are considered failures in that environment. I see so many people through the maker community that thought of themselves as failures in school but went on to have really productive lives.
Thomas: I have dyslexia and dyscalculia. In ninth grade, my math scores were atrocious, and my grades in general were atrocious. But as a ninth grader, I’m building microprocessor-controlled robots that can extinguish fires in industrial facilities, literally. My teachers and my school system considered me a failure because I wasn’t getting A’s in math and science and reading. I was told by a guidance counselor my senior year that the best I was ever going to hope for was a minimum wage factory job. I went on to have a very successful computer company and a robotics company for a decade that was covered several times by Make magazine. Now I’m an educator, and I get to pay all that forward to my kids. That was me. I was that kid.
Dale: That’s wonderful. Your private school has a lot more flexibility than public schools. They can’t help themselves from wanting to structure everything the same way. A lot of times, kids just don’t get much time in a maker space to do projects, which always kind of disturbed me.
Thomas: Absolutely. Even as a private school, sometimes getting the students enough time in front of the projects is always an ongoing challenge. But the nice thing about ENIAC is I was able to spread it across all seven of my classes. So, it became one long-term rolling project from period to period.
Rebuilding History
Dale: This is a really ambitious project. The first question when I looked at the pictures is how did you get enough space to build it? It looked like you were in the gym.
Thomas: I’ve been here six years now, and I’ve never been told no for any project. This is probably the closest I’ve ever been to being told no. I was like, “It’s 500 square feet, and it’s pretty much going to take up the entire gymnasium.” It was initially a little bit of a hard sell because it sounded larger than life—because it was larger than life. Our administration trusted me and they trusted the kids and they gave us the green light. One of the biggest concerns was, “How are you going to do it in a six-month period?”.
Dale: This month, it’s the 80th anniversary of ENIAC.
Thomas: The crazy part about that is, I feel like the universe just lined up for us. We had talked about this project for three or four years because I would teach ENIAC every year. We were talking, “We should build a full-scale replica.” This year, we just decided to do it, and magically it’s the 80th anniversary. We started it in early August and finished it in late December. It was a fairly tight time frame.
The Significance of the ENIAC Computer
Thomas: ENIAC is considered to be the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer. It could be reprogrammed to solve a variety of problems, just like the computers that we use today. It really is the grandfather of your smartphone, of your laptop.
It was built in Pennsylvania at the Moore School of Engineering and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It was originally funded by the United States Army in 1943 to calculate ballistic trajectories, and enormous teams of people were taking weeks to do a single trajectory. They commissioned the Moore School of Engineering to develop this machine. Ironically, it was finished in the very final days of the war and never contributed directly to the war effort. But it still contributed to national security—it was used to develop our nuclear programs and was in heavy rotation for over a decade.
The ‘Magic Formula’ for Engagement
Dale: How do you get kids interested in this? It’s your idea. I would see some kids thinking, “Teacher Tom wants to build something, and he wants us all to contribute to that”.
Thomas: That part ended up being so easy because it is a magic formula for engagement. You give kids work that matters. Period. If I would have framed it like, “Hey, it’s a really cool machine, and we’re going to build it,” I don’t think it would have really gotten any traction. Here was the game changer: I approached the students and said, “Look guys, I need your help. We have an opportunity here to do work that matters. We have a project where we can make a mark in history. We can do substantial work—university level work, adult work—and we can do work that’s important and history making”.
The students immediately grasped and owned the project. We reached out to the Computer History Museum and the families of Eckert and Mauchly, and I made it very clear this isn’t a little school craft project. We want original documents and blueprints and patent drawings. We used this language a lot: we want to rebuild ENIAC so for the first time in 70 years it will be available to tour in its entirety as it was originally created.
Brian Stewart, the ENIAC historian, flew in from Pennsylvania, since no one since 1955 has been able to see ENIAC in its entirety. He was “shocked”.
He said, “I was standing here and I was imagining the flow of data through the machine. And then I remembered this was built by kids.”
Neurodivergent strengths
Dale: How did you manage the project? There’s a lot of pieces, and you have different classes. They got to pick it up on one day and put it down in an hour or hand it off to someone else.
Thomas: One of the keys was communication. The students had our “confidential binders,” named after the original confidential project during World War II. We used those binders as a tool of communicating between classes so we could look at other teams’ notes.
The incredible superpower of dyscalculia is big-picture thinking and 3D spatial reasoning. I have this crazy ability to design these giant projects in my head and hold that all in my head and manage the scope and the scale. With most of my kids living with autism, their superpower is repetition without loss of quality. In the end, we didn’t choose a simpler project; we chose a project that fits the way we think.
Creating an Accurate Replica
Thomas: Our goal was to create an immersive experience where people could walk inside the machine, with the sights and sounds. We built a one-to-one replica using original patent drawings and blueprints graciously provided by the Mauchly family and the Computer History Museum.
We had to work within the constraints of a school. We had a laser printer and hot glue guns. We found the electrical engineering symbol for the 6SN7 vacuum tube, the most prevalent tube in the machine. We hand-installed 18,000 top-down view representations of vacuum tubes. We made wooden frames and covered them in double-wall cardboard.
In all, the replica has well over 20,000 hand-designed, hand-built, and hand-installed parts. This includes about 2,500 “chicken head knobs,” which were custom-designed for the original ENIAC because they looked like chicken beaks.
The electrical work was managed by a team of students and the school owner’s father, a former electrical engineer for Motorola. They built all of the wiring and the circuitry, the wiring diagrams, and the soldering to run a ton of amber LEDs.
The Original Programmers and ENIAC’s Complexity
Dale: Is that how you program the ENIAC? With knobs and switches? Was there a teletype or keyboard?
Thomas: No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, none of that. The machine was programmed in a very physical way by moving those patch cables around and also flipping those zillions of switches. Every time the machine would have to solve a new problem, you would have to reprogram the machine.
The machine was programmed by six women programmers who were called “computers”. Unfortunately, because of the time period, those women were not given credit for any of their work. They were only given schematics and access to the engineers, who basically said, “We built it. Now you need to figure out how we’re going to program this thing.”. It astounds me to even vocalize it. These women looked at schematics and talked to the engineers and they figured out how to program this machine. Those women eventually received full recognition for their work. (ENIAC's six primary programmers were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Wikipedia.)
Reflecting on the machine’s construction
Thomas: I thought, “Oh, it’s an 80-year-old computer. How hard could it be?” I went into it with the assumption that it was going to be a very simple machine. The more you dug into it, the more you realized the astounding complexity of it. I understand modern computers far, far easier than I understand ENIAC.
The project, which spanned from August to December, consumed over 23,000 hours of student labor—the equivalent of one person working 11 years full-time. The final statistics include using 1,600 hot glue sticks—over a half of a mile of hot glue end to end—and over 3,000 square feet of cardboard.
The replica is scheduled for disassembly tomorrow because it has been in the gymnasium for a solid three weeks, disrupting the gym classes and the lunch schedule. We are in discussions with several places for permanent exhibition, which I truly hope happens.
