B.F. Skinner

Hello! My full name is Burrhus Frederic Skinner, but you can call me Fred. I was born on March 20th, 1904, in a small town in Pennsylvania. When I was a boy, I loved to invent and build all sorts of gadgets. I would spend hours creating things and watching how they worked. I also loved watching animals. I was very curious about them, and about people, too. I always wondered, 'Why do they do the things they do?' This big question stayed with me as I grew up and started my life's work trying to find the answer.

When I got older, I went to a big school called Harvard University in 1928. There, I began to study the mind very carefully. I wanted to answer that big question from my childhood: 'How do we learn?' I had an idea that I called 'reinforcement.' It sounds like a big word, but it's a simple idea. It means that when something good happens right after you do something, your brain remembers it, and you want to do that action again. Think about a little puppy. If you teach it to sit, and it gets a yummy treat every time it does, it learns to sit very quickly. The treat is the good thing—the reinforcement—that helps the puppy learn.

Because I was an inventor, I loved building things to test my ideas. In the 1930s, I built a special box, which people later called a 'Skinner Box.' Inside, I could watch how animals like pigeons learned to press a button to get a snack. It helped me understand how reinforcement worked. Later, in 1945, when my daughter was born, I built a special cozy crib for her called an 'Air-Crib' that was always the perfect temperature. I also wanted to help children learn better in school. In the 1950s, long before computers were in classrooms, I invented a 'Teaching Machine.' It was a box that showed kids questions and then told them if they were right. This helped them learn at their own pace, which I thought was very important.

My ideas about learning have helped many people. Teachers learned new ways to help students in the classroom, and scientists discovered more about how our brains work. Even animal trainers use my ideas to teach animals new things in gentle and positive ways. I lived to be 86 years old. I am so happy that my work still helps both people and animals all over the world learn new and wonderful things.