For Educators

The Analytical Language Engine is a working miniature of a large language model, dressed as a Victorian brass machine. Its probabilities are computed live; nothing is staged. That makes it usable as a genuine laboratory instrument — the same cabinet serves an eight-year-old playing a guessing game and a senior seminar on the philosophy of mind.

How this guide works

This is a spiral curriculum: the same five threads return at each grade band, each time with more sophistication. Nothing taught early has to be untaught later — the machine a third grader meets as a "guessing machine" is the same machine a twelfth grader analyses as an interpolated Markov model, and both descriptions are true. Each grade has its own page; share the one your colleagues need.

Ten-minute orientation (for you, before class)

• Open the Engine. Leave Wait at each station ticked; pull Begin the Demonstration and press Proceed (or Enter) through all eight stations once.
• Afterwards, Turn the Crank a few times and Run the Engine once to the stop mark ∎.
• Move the boiler lever (Station VII) and watch the gauges at Station VI re-compute instantly — this is your best single demonstration.
• Open the Type Drawer under Station II — the machine's entire vocabulary, all ~231 words.
• Optional: tick Let the works be heard for sound. For the arithmetic itself, read The Mathematics Behind the Engine.

Primary sources (all freely available online)

• L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1842), translated with Notes by Ada Lovelace (1843) — Notes A and G are the classroom essentials.
• A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59 (1950) — answers "Lady Lovelace's Objection" by name.
• J. R. Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980).
• E. M. Bender et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots," FAccT (2021).
• The Science Museum, London — Difference Engine No. 2, built 1985–1991, printer completed 2002.

Standards touchpoints

Offered as orientation, not a formal crosswalk:

• Grade 3: CCSS Math 3.MD (represent and interpret data); operations & patterns (3.OA); collaborative discussion (ELA SL.3.1).
• Grade 6: CCSS 6.SP (distributions and variability), previewing 7.SP.C (probability models — formally a Grade 7 domain, met here through experiment); CSTA algorithms & data.
• Grade 9: CCSS HS S-CP (conditional probability), S-IC (inference from randomised experiment); CSTA impacts of computing & AI.
• Grade 12: S-MD (probability in decisions); AP CS Principles big ideas (algorithms, data, impact); seminar practice in philosophy and history of science.

Every number this guide cites about the cabinet — 79 sentences, ~231 sorts, 24 rack places, the λ weights — is live in the machine and checkable by your students. If they catch a discrepancy, they have learned the most important lesson of all: audit the machine.