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What Works in Public Education

Next Stop: The Goldfish Bowl

by James Daly

Albert isn't your typical smarty-pants soccer-playing kid. In fact, Albert isn't a kid at all. He's a calico fantail goldfish that fourth-grader Kyle Pomerleau and his dad have trained to do some very nonfishy things, including zipping through a hoop and pushing a soccer ball into a net -- even doing the limbo by swimming under a bar.

In 2004, Kyle won Albert in a fair at his school, Richland Elementary School, in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania. On a whim, he and his dad Dean, a software engineer, attempted to teach Albert to do tricks using the same positive reinforcement and so-called shaping techniques commonly used to train dolphins, circus animals, dogs, and sometimes even kids -- that is, desired behavior was rewarded: A pointy-tipped feeder delivered the fish a food pellet after each trick or sequence of events was performed successfully.

A few weeks later, Albert was performing on command, and a small father-son online business selling fish-training kits was born. In addition, Albert (short for Albert Einstein) has landed a place in the next Guinness World Records, officially listed as the fish having the greatest repertoire of tricks. It's quite an honor, Dean Pomerleau admits. "These fish are a lot smarter than we give them credit for."

This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, July 2006