In 1981, she was awarded $130,000 by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Education to develop programs in geometry and logic for second- and third-graders. In 1979, she won a grant - $1,000 and her very own Apple II - from the Apple Education Foundation, to create a program that would teach preschoolers directional concepts like “above and below” or “left and right.” (She specialized in black dialect, writing a dissertation that is still being referenced by linguists today.)įollowing a five-year stint developing teaching models for low-income schools, McCormick became interested in the nascent world of personal computing. Determined to address these issues on a structural level, she returned to the west coast and received her doctorate in education at UC Berkeley. 74, she was shocked to find that, even at 13 years old, a handful of her students could hardly read a full sentence on their own. That alone was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s like the Holy Grail of learning.’”Īt P.S. A lot of educators could see quickly how powerful the medium was for giving kid instant feedback.

“It attracted pioneers both in the business sense and the education sense. “It’s a fascinating story,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review. But by 2000, the company was in financial shambles - and, in what was labeled one of the worst business deals of all time, almost took a Fortune 500 company down with it. At a certain point, TLC owned pretty much every computer game that mattered to millennials: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, even Oregon Trail. Both Reader Rabbit and Cluefinders were the work of The Learning Company (TLC), a dominant player in the realm of educational software during its peak in the late 1980s and ’90s. Little did I know, the real drama was happening off-screen.

One year, I helped Reader Rabbit salvage the town play after it was sabotaged by an angry chipmunk another, I joined the Cluefinders to traverse the Numerian jungle and defeat a mysterious winged monster known as “Mathra.” I bought new costumes by solving addition problems, unlocked ancient gates by pairing synonymous words, even hitched a ride with a flock of birds after brushing up on U.S. As a result, I spent many a 100-degree Texas day indoors, glued to our family’s outdated computer monitor. Each May, as the elementary school year was winding down, our teachers would send us home with a new educational CD-ROM - hoping, I assume, that it would keep our young brains from rotting away during the lazy summer months.

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