The first interaction I ever had with a computer was in 1988, at school when I was five. I remember telling my Granddad about it, and he told me “Computers in school will never take off, and if they do it will just make children dumb.” I'm not sure whether he was right or wrong.
The BBC Micro. First unveiled in 1981 became part of the furniture in school in the late 80s, with the introduction of the ‘BBC Computer Literacy Project’. Built by Acorn Computers with a 2MHz processor and 32kb of RAM, by the 90’s, 80% of schools in Briton had a least one in their school.
The idea was to educate with having fun, a forerunner to Piaget’s theory of ‘Learning with play’, used in schools today. I remember games such as ‘Granny’s Garden’ and ‘Eldorado Gold’. Both text based adventure games with very basic graphics. ’Eldorado Gold’, created by Micro Power was loved by all of my peers. There was neither mouse nor joystick and all games came on a large floppy disk.
With the school only having one computer, as was the norm in the 1980’s, the wait to use it could be very frustrating. You would have to wait all week to be allowed one fifteen-minute slot.
But it was worth it, the excitement of putting down your pen and colouring crayons and typing, “Light lamp” to the question on screen, “You are in a cave entrance. To the East a tunnel goes into the darkness. What do you do next?”, was hard to contain.
