Photo Caption: A Japanese abacus (soroban) held over an older style Chinese abacus (suan pan). Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III. Can the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse provide new lessons for ...

For this series, we've been thinking a lot about some of the iconic objects that some of us remember using — if only for a short period of time — in our early schooling. Slide rules, the recorder, ...