In 1983 a British primary school with a computer usually had exactly one, and it was usually a BBC Micro bought at half price with government money. The programs that ran on it had often been paid for by the government too, written by teams of teachers under a national scheme with its headquarters in a semi-detached house in Newcastle. Across the Atlantic the same job was done by a consortium of Minnesota’s schools and universities, and then by companies that sold to parents as eagerly as to teachers. Educational software is the story of those two routes, and of the programs that children remembered long after the lessons: a wagon trail to Oregon, a witch in a garden, a turtle that drew what you told it to.
America: a consortium and a market
The American pattern was set in Minnesota. In 1973 the state’s four public education systems formed the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, MECC, rather than let hundreds of school districts buy and program their own computers. MECC wrote programs, trained teachers and negotiated statewide hardware contracts, and by the early 1980s it was selling its catalogue far beyond the state. Its best-known program, The Oregon Trail, was older than MECC itself: Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger had written it in 1971 to teach Rawitsch’s students about pioneer life.
Commercial publishers followed, and they sold to families as well as schools. The Learning Company was founded by the educational psychologist Ann Piestrup with a research grant. It taught nine-year-olds digital logic with Rocky’s Boots (1982), and in 1984 it published Reader Rabbit, word games for four- to eight-year-olds. Brøderbund’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985) was sold as a detective game with a copy of The World Almanac in the box, and teachers adopted it anyway. By 1988 COMPUTE!’s summer guide for parents could list The Oregon Trail, Math Blaster and Reader Rabbit in one table, at between about $40 and $60 each.
Britain: the state as publisher
Britain took a different road. The government both paid for the machines and commissioned the programs.
The Microelectronics Education Programme
The Microelectronics Education Programme (MEP) came out of the Department of Education and Science. Sinclair User complained in 1984 that it had begun “belatedly, in 1981, two years after it was ready to move”: the Labour government had planned it for 1979, and the incoming Conservative government halted it as part of its spending cuts. When Your Computer interviewed its director, Richard Fothergill, in December 1981, the programme had £9.5 million of state money and was run “from a small semi-detached house on the campus of Newcastle Polytechnic”. Fothergill was enthusiastic about computers at home as well as at school: “A Sinclair connected to the television is more entertaining than the TV programmes on it.”
The MEP paid teachers, programmers and publishers to produce classroom programs, much of it for the BBC Micro but also for the Spectrum and other machines. Its work turned up in unexpected places. It developed the BBC Buggy, a £150 three-wheeled robot driven from a BBC Model B, with sensors for light and collisions and an infra-red reader underneath that could follow a line. It helped BBC Radio produce “computer-synchronised” schools broadcasts, radio programmes with software that ran alongside them. Commercial publishers advertised titles “developed by experienced teachers through the Government’s Microelectronics Education Programme”.
The programme’s own primary-school pack went free to every school that bought a micro under the government’s subsidy scheme. By the middle of 1984 it had, in Acorn Programs’ words, “gone to 27,000 primary schools” and had cost “about £100,000” to develop, with teacher-training material as well as language and mathematics programs. It was not flawless. The same report said the Mathematical Association had found “serious errors” in the pack, and an Inner London Education Authority spokesman warned that “standards in educational software are uneven and teachers should look carefully at packages before they buy them.”
The MEP was always meant to be temporary. Acorn User reported in October 1984 that it was “due to be wound up in March 1986”, and it described its role as “pump-priming”: provide the first hardware, software and training, then leave the rest to local education authorities. Its successor, the Microelectronics Education Support Unit (MESU), was announced in July 1985 but did not start work until January 1987, at the University of Warwick Science Park. In 1988 the Department of Education and Science merged it with the Council for Educational Technology to form the National Council for Educational Technology.
A micro for every school
The machines came from the Department of Industry. Its Micros in Schools scheme had paid half the cost of a computer for secondary schools, and Acorn User reported that every eligible school took it up before it closed in 1983. In July 1982 Margaret Thatcher announced a £9 million subsidy for primary schools, on a visit to South Downs College in Havant. A primary school could buy one computer at half price, and it had to be British: a 48K ZX Spectrum, a Research Machines 480Z or a BBC Micro Model B.
The choice was open, but schools made it the same way. In March 1983, with more than 4,000 primary schools already applying, The Micro User reported that 87 per cent had chosen the BBC Micro over “the much cheaper Spectrum and the much dearer 480Z”. By October 1984, 20,000 of the 27,000 primary schools in England and Wales had taken up the offer, and 80 per cent of them had bought the Beeb. Looking back in 2007, Retro Gamer put it down to the machine’s “established reputation as a tool for learning”, which the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project had given it.
One computer did not go far. Acorn User’s Geoff Nairn pointed out that “one solitary micro in a school of 350 children is unlikely to make much impact”, particularly when lessons stopped for programs to load from cassette. Each school had to send two teachers on a two-day course, in which, Nairn wrote, a teacher new to computers “can just about get the hang of operating the Beeb - plugging it in, using the cassette recorder”. Sinclair User was blunter. Working from the Department of Education and Science’s figures, it put the total bought by schools at fewer than 50,000, with only a third of primary schools owning any computer at all, and concluded: “If children are becoming computer literate - and that is questionable - then they are doing so at home, not in schools.”
Granny’s Garden
The program British children remember best came not from the MEP but from a small publisher in Barnstaple, Devon. 4Mation’s Granny’s Garden, written by Mike Matson, was advertised at the end of 1983 as “an exciting 2 stage adventure/project for young children who have to rescue the Royal children from the witch”, for ages six and up, on BBC cassette at £10. The advert promised “colourful graphics, double-height text”. A wrong turn could bring the witch and her cry, which Retro Gamer still quoted in 2007: “Ha ha! Now I’ve got you! I will send you home at once.” 4Mation sold it for groups as well as individual children, and teachers used it as the start of a topic rather than a lesson in itself. An enhanced edition was still being reviewed in 1992, as “a starting point or link for a number of other studies”.
Logo and the turtle
Not every classroom program was a drill or an adventure. Logo, Seymour Papert’s language for children, reached British primary schools on the same subsidised BBC Micros: Acorn User printed a Croydon teacher’s account of using it in December 1982. Children drove a turtle around the screen, or a robot one around the classroom floor, by typing FORWARD 50 and RIGHT 90. By 1985 the BBC Micro had four rival versions of the language to choose from.
The CD-ROM years and after
Floppy disks and cassettes held drills and adventures. The CD-ROM, with room for hundreds of megabytes, made the encyclopaedia the flagship of educational software in the 1990s. Microsoft’s Encarta, built on the text of Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia with pictures, sound and animation added, was due in the shops within weeks, the German magazine PC Games reported in October 1993. Brøderbund’s Living Books turned children’s picture books into animated, talking programs from 1992. The companies consolidated too: by 1998 MECC, The Learning Company and Brøderbund all belonged to one publisher, the former SoftKey, which had taken The Learning Company’s name.
The web ended that era. Microsoft stopped selling Encarta in 2009, giving “changes in the way people seek information” as a reason, and closed its website at the end of that October. Papert’s idea outlived the formats. The designers of Scratch, the children’s programming language from MIT, cite his argument that a language for learners should have a “low floor” and a “high ceiling”.
Sources
- For MECC, The Oregon Trail, The Learning Company, Reader Rabbit, Brøderbund, Carmen Sandiego, Living Books and the SoftKey purchases, see the MECC, The Learning Company and Brøderbund entries and the period sources they cite, among them Fred D’Ignazio, “Kids, Computers, and Summer Vacation”, COMPUTE! issue 96, May 1988, pp. 22–25.
- Your Computer, December 1981: Bill Bennett, interview with Richard Fothergill (the £9.5 million, the Newcastle Polytechnic base, the MEP team and Fothergill’s remark about the Sinclair).
- Your Computer, February 1983, news: the BBC Buggy “developed for the BBC by the Microelectronics Education Programme”.
- Personal Computer News issue 97, February 1985: MEP support for BBC computer-synchronised radio programmes, with Richard Fothergill’s comments.
- Your Computer, December 1984: publisher’s advertisement for programs “developed by experienced teachers through the Government’s Microelectronics Education Programme”.
- Acorn Programs, June/July 1984, news, “Bad marks for maths programs”: the MEP primary pack, its cost, its reach, the eligible machines, the Mathematical Association’s criticism and the ILEA comment.
- Acorn User issue 2, September 1982, news: the £9 million subsidy for primary schools announced at South Downs College, Havant.
- The Micro User vol. 1 no. 1, March 1983, news: over 4,000 applications and the 87 per cent choosing the BBC Micro.
- Geoff Nairn, “Could do better”, Acorn User issue 27, October 1984: the primary scheme’s announcement in July 1982, the half-price terms and the three British machines, the 20,000 of 27,000 schools and 80 per cent for the BBC, the secondary scheme’s full take-up, the training requirement, the MEP’s “pump-priming” role and its wind-up date.
- Sinclair User issue 25, April 1984, editorial: the MEP’s delayed start, the DES figures on school computers, and the quotation on computer literacy at home.
- The Micro User vol. 1 no. 10, December 1983: 4MAT (4Mation) advertisement for Granny’s Garden (ages 6+, cassette £10).
- Personal Computing Today vol. 3 no. 2, September 1984: educational software directory, 4MAT Educational Software, Barnstaple (Granny’s Garden, £11.50 cassette, £13.80 disc).
- Your Computer (Australia), April 1992, “Educational Software”: the enhanced edition of “Mike Matson’s classic problem solving adventure”, its use as a starting point for cross-curricular work.
- Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007: BBC Micro feature (the machine’s reputation in schools; Granny’s Garden, 1983, 4Mation, and the witch’s line).
- For Logo on the BBC Micro and in British schools, and the Scratch designers’ “low floor” and “high ceiling”, see the Logo entry and its sources, including Acorn User, December 1982 and May 1985.
- PC Games (Germany), October 1993: Encarta announced, based on Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (in German).
- “Microelectronics Education Programme” and “Microelectronics Education Support Unit”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), citing Richard Fothergill, Implications of New Technology for the School Curriculum (Kogan Page, 1988), p. 28: MESU announced in July 1985, operational from January 1987 at the University of Warwick Science Park, merged with the Council for Educational Technology in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_Education_Programme and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_Education_Support_Unit
- “Encarta”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the end of sales in 2009 and the closure of the website on 31 October 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta