Founder’s Note

I carry a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) name – Wadontei:io – which can be translated as A Good Gate. In Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition, a gate may not be a barrier. It may be a threshold – a place of passage, of invitation, of movement from one understanding to the next. That idea has followed me through a long career in media, economics, and education, and it is the idea at the heart of this site.

PrecisionStep Tutorials was born from a simple but persistent frustration: most learning is designed to inform, not to transform. Lectures, textbooks, and videos deliver content – but delivering content is not the same as producing understanding. Real understanding is built step by step, each new idea grounded in the one before it.

That insight belongs, in its scientific form, to B.F. Skinner. Working at Harvard in the mid-twentieth century as a psychology professor, Skinner developed programmed learning – a method that breaks any subject into precisely sequenced micro-steps, each one small enough to succeed, each one building naturally toward the next. His research showed that when the sequence is right and the pacing is right, almost any learner can master almost any subject. The method was remarkable. And then, somehow, it was largely forgotten.

PrecisionStep Tutorials is built to recover it. Any subject becomes learnable when broken into the right micro-steps, in the right order, at the right pace. Choose any topic. Your lesson builds itself around you.

I built this to first assist my grandchildren. Then for anyone – adult or young person – who has ever felt that a subject was beyond them, and suspected, quietly, that the problem might not be them at all.

It probably wasn’t.

The Gate is open. Please step through.