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. As a result, I spent many a 100-degree Texas day indoors, glued to our family’s outdated computer monitor. 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. geography.
Little did I know, the real drama was happening off-screen. 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. 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. 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.
“It’s a fascinating story,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review. “It attracted pioneers both in the business sense and the education sense. A lot of educators could see quickly how powerful the medium was for giving kid instant feedback. That alone was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s like the Holy Grail of learning.’”
Perhaps appropriately, then, it all started with an ex-nun.
“The programs I designed were done to lead kids towards the answer, rather than punish them for not getting it the first time round.” — Leslie Grimm, The Learning Company co-founder
For six years, Ann McCormick was a sister of St. Joseph of the Peace in Washington state. But it wasn’t until she left the convent and moved to East Buffalo, New York, to teach fifth grade that she had the first inklings of her true calling.
At P.S. 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. Determined to address these issues on a structural level, she returned to the west coast and received her doctorate in education at UC Berkeley. (She specialized in black dialect, writing a dissertation that is still being referenced by linguists today.)
Following a five-year stint developing teaching models for low-income schools, McCormick became interested in the nascent world of personal computing. In 1977, the Apple II hit shelves. 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.”
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. When her original grant partner dropped out, McCormick recruited Teri Perl, an educational psychologist with a PhD in mathematics from Stanford, as the vice president and resident math whiz .
Of course, she also needed someone who understood computers — and Warren Robinett happened to be looking for a job. The 20-something computer engineer had recently quit Atari, where he’d designed and programmed the genre-defining video game Adventure. (Later, Robinett would become quietly famous for hiding his name within the game as a “fuck you” to his corporate bosses, who wouldn’t let programmers publicly claim authorship of their work. It became gaming’s first known “Easter egg” — and a key plot point in the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One.)
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