In the past decade, there have been proposals and initiatives the within the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) to develop an introductory course to cybernetics, referred to as "Cybernetics 101". For the most part, these initiatives are currently dormant. One important reason for this appears to be a dilemma between the ambition to create a general, one-fits-all curriculum on the one hand, and the large degree to which the promotion of cybernetics depended on particular individuals in the past.

This is a proposal for a presentation of an initiative that aims to develop a suitable and contemporary pedagogy for cybernetics and related learning materials for both individual as well as for organized learning. It is at this time a personal initiative, but this may change in the future. Analogously to Margaret Mead‘s (1968) call to the American Society for Cybernetics to apply cybernetics to itself ("cybernetics of cybernetics"), it aims to utilize cybernetic resources and accomplishments of the past in the pedagogy of cybernetics to perpetuate the discipline into the future in times of dwindling institutional support. It takes a hands-on, constructivist learning approach with a focus on applied computer-programming based exercises using low-cost hardware and free software.

Its primary goal is to introduce key first- and second-order cybernetic concepts developed since World War II in a way that is accessible for speculative interaction and digital experimentation, somewhat in the way the toy steam engine gave access to experimentation with self-regulation in mechanical systems. It is hope that this will help re-align the developments of cybernetics (as a philosophical field) and computing (as an engineering field) in some places.

The computing field, itself a spawn of cybernetics in some ways, recently experienced a proliferation of study and play resources for "makers" and young people to familiarize themselves with digital technology, programming and networking. Of these, the single-board low-cost computer Raspberry Pi, its open-source operating system Raspbian (a Debian-derived Linux) and the programming language Python 3 were chosen at the technical basis for this project.

The course is designed to enable both individual self-study as well as formal classes, and it fit the scope of a one-semester introductory undergraduate module. As a electronically enhanced textbook, it offers a coherent overarching narrative that is illustrated and substantiated by various demonstrations, anecdotes, short audio and video clips of cybernetic sources, and, first and foremost, hands-on exercises. Aiming to inspire an appreciation for the concerns and characteristics of cybernetics, the course design currently focuses on assumptions that set cybernetics apart form other fields in the systems research family, as well as from conventional natural science: Observer-dependence, non-determinability, circular causality, and self-organization.

The majority of the hands-on exercises takes the format of applied coding assignments. "Technical" approaches have more conventionally been associated with first-order cybernetics and utilitarian control systems. In this case, however, computer technology is taken as an output of past cybernetics to illustrate and inspire cybernetics and cyberneticians of the future. The hands-on exercises include: A programmable Turing Machine, a simple Wiener anti-aircraft predictor, a thermostat data logger, a Shannon mind reading machine, demonstrations of subjective participation in observation, various eigenwert and eigenbehaviour demonstrations based on recursive functions, a simulation of the Ebbinghaus "forgetting curve", and an implementation of Varela‘s autopoiesis cellular automata system.