What Ever Happened to Educational Software?

What happened to educational software is that it went through a couple of stages and disappeared. In the first stage, computers were so novel that anything done with one was considered useful preparation for the future. Kids would go to their school’s computer lab for a session and practice “keyboarding skills,” play dumb math games or the ubiquitous Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego games.

Over time, teachers, parents, and the children realized that computers plus crummy software, while more fun than doing math exercises out of books, is not equal to magical teaching machine. And since by then the kids also had video-game machines, they knew that, not only did dumb math games not teach them math, they weren’t very good games.

The next stage was the “epiphany” that computers were just tools and should be used by children the same way they were being used by adults — for their dull and clumsy office applications such as word processors and spreadsheets. This change in perception, not coincidentally, came about as many adults were buying “serious” personal computers for their homes. Time for kids to be as bored as adults were by modern technology. Luckily for the kids, they still had those video-game machines, which, unlike educational software, were getting better all the time.

It’s not that educational software ceased to exist, it’s that the enthusiasm for its promise evaporated. First, the ambitious and creative companies sold out to conglomerates (which are now mostly part of Riverdeep.net) who milk profits out of designs that are at least 15 years old. Second, grant-funding charities, such as the Markle Foundation, stopped funding research in educational software. So while educational titles get facelifts, there aren’t any new designs. It would be as if General Motors was selling cars with 15-year-old engineering covered by new sheet metal. (Oh, wait-a-second, they are.)

So innovation in educational software is long dead. What’s left is surfing the Internet, exchanging gossip on MySpace, and playing World of Warcraft, definitely an educational upgrade over struggling with Microsoft Office.

I think that the death of educational software is a good thing. You couldn’t exaggerate its death too much for my taste, because I think that it never existed. Most of what we called educational software was book-learning transferred to the screen and animated. If a new technology is going to change what we learn, it needs to change how we learn.