About this trainer

This is a work in progress. The character selection algorithm uses a confidence model that weights characters by how well you've been doing — characters you struggle with appear more often, well-known ones appear less. New characters are introduced when your average confidence across the active set crosses a threshold. Future plans include structured lessons (not just random characters), word and callsign drills, and a sending-side mode.

The Koch method

The character order follows the Koch method, proposed by German psychologist Ludwig Koch in 1935. Instead of learning the alphabet by chart and slowly speeding up, Koch's approach starts at full target speed with just two characters and adds more one by one. The brain learns each character as a sound shape rather than as a sequence of dots and dashes — this is closer to how skilled operators actually decode.

Lineage

The "introduce new characters when you've mastered the current set" approach was first automated by Ward Cunningham (WA9VRU) in his article "A Fully Automatic Morse Code Teaching Machine" published in QST, May 1977. Ward Cunningham is better known today as the inventor of the wiki — but this earlier work on adaptive Morse training has quietly influenced almost every Koch-method trainer since.

The Farnsworth timing scheme (full character speed with extended inter-character gaps) is named after Donald R. "Russ" Farnsworth and addresses the same problem from a different angle.

References

Ward Cunningham — Morse Code Teaching Machine (original source page, with historical notes and DOS/MS-DOS implementations)
Internet Archive — Morse Code Training Program (playable in browser)
Wikipedia — Koch method
Wikipedia — Farnsworth timing

Built and maintained by Selim Gezicioğlu (TA2WHM). Bug reports and suggestions welcome — contact info on the about page.