EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE suburbs or in large cities with sizable ap- propriations for computer-based instruc- tion. Small towns and rural districts, as well as low-income cities, lag behind, ex- cept where a state has promoted and sup- ported a computer initiative. More boys than girls are encouraged to take up com- puter use, except in the lower grades. Minorities are inadequately represented in advanced computer science courses. Sixth, software is still driven by what most educational publishers have reluc- tantly had to buy or develop to supplement their textbooks to meet adoption re- quirements. These multimillion-dollar businesses control the market and deter- mine what children learn. Being busi- nesses, they cannot afford to take risks, so few of them publish innovative educa- tional software. So what have schools been using on the reported figure of 1.6 million computers in the schools? More precisely, what and how have they been teaching with them? 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And it's available direct to you right now ! Loaded With Languages Turn on your 375 andstart developing your own applications. It's that easy. C, FORTRAN, PASCAL, BASIC, APL, Assembler, LISP and PROLOG: they all come standard on every 375. * 4 RS232 Ports (up to 36 optional!) * Paralle! Printer Port * External Winchester and Floppy Ports * Series 32000, 10MHz, VM, FPU CALL US TODAY * Prepaid. Sales tax and Shipping Costs not included. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T Bell Labs. SYMMETRIC COMPUTER SYSTEMS - 1620 Oakland Rd. Suite D200 - San Jose, CA 95131 VAX is a trademark of Digital Equipment Series 32000 is a trademark of National Semiconductor Corp (408) 279-0700 194 BYTE + FEBRUARY 1987 Inquiry 283 own instructional software. A teacher who could see how to make a computer do something more easily might design a simple program for local use or might col- laborate with a programmer or engineer friend. If a colleague wanted to try out the product, so much the better. A few small publishers polished such programs up and offered them inexpensively. Sometimes the programs were full of bugs. General- ly, they looked primitive. A great many single-concept science programs began this way. Other programmers took the educa- tional software and ideas that had already been developed for timesharing systems and rewrote them for micros. Very few of these early programs offered more than a textbook or a workbook, but they fit right into the curriculum and gave the computer something to do that didn’t strain its powers. After a while, complaints began to emerge about the rough quality of the available educational software. As com- puters gained more memory capacity, authors began to write more polished pro- grams. Many of these were so formulaic that authoring systems were published that allowed teachers to develop their own drills or branching multiple-choice pro- grams. Even when such programs are pro- fessionally prepared and are supplied with ornamental graphics and sound, they are what teachers and students have come to describe as dull, at best. Only when educational software began to look like a commercially worthwhile field did graphics designers, software engineers, and teachers come out of hiding. Conventions evolved about what an ideal program should look like and contain. Hands-off or Hands-on When “‘computer literacy” entered the curriculum, it focused on hardware, not software. It meant courses on “How the Computer Works,” “Inside the Com- puter,” “The Impact of Computers on Our Society,” or “Our Friend, the Computer.” Children were given paper-and-pencil tests on what they learned about com- puters. We all know youngsters who had to draw the CPU, memory banks, input, ouput, and keyboard. Step-by-step lesson plans were designed by curriculum devel- opers. It is little wonder that many high schoolers now hate computer courses. Apparently, however, educators thought that was the way to incorporate computer consciousness into the curriculum. But awareness is only a first step in literacy. People don’t learn to drive a car by reading a manual. Practice is the best teacher. We learn continued