In the article the focus is put on educational aspects of the speech processing science. A set of tools that have been developed with the aim at presenting, visualizing and explaining basic topics of speech recognition is described. The set consists of programs, like a signal analysis unit, a dynamic time warping algorithm (DTW) explorer and hidden Markov model (HMM) investigation tools, that are integrated into a single environment and allow for easy and highly illustrative learning through experiments with real speech data.