If you only use technology to surf the internet, use office productivity tools like Word, Powerpoint and Excel, great, but you’re a user, you’re an administrative clerk. This advert for the commodore VIC20 from 1981 sums it all up: being able to use technology and play games is not a skill that will set you apart from anyone else. they use technology but don’t understand it.they lack outlets to develop their imagination and creativity.they lack strategies to process ideas logically.they lack resilience to overcome failure.The more I got into teaching and found out what kids of today could do, and not do, and saw the skills and ideas they had, and didn’t have, I came too a conclusion that many of the opportunities for learning that I got from my VIC20 are missing from so many of my students: I set it up in my lab and left it on the side with this poster next to it, as teaching took over my life (as any new teacher will tell you). I set it up and took a photo of it (that was turned into a Top Trumps card by the makers of The Commodore Story see above). My much loved VIC20 went back in its box and into the loft.īut when I started teaching, it came back down. I then did what almost everyone else did with their computers as they became more and more powerful: I stopped programming and started using them as multimedia controllers: making music, artwork, desktop publishing, then managing photography, music libraries, video, animation and so on (getting my first Apple Macintosh in 1995). Then, like everyone else I moved onto a more sophisticated computer, in my case an Atari ST, at Christmas 1986. And that’s exactly what I did for for four years. You can make your own games and figure out how computers work. The point is it was a programmable computer. In case you don’t recognise it, it’s one of the the first ever home colour computers, the first to sell over a million units (it ended up selling over 5 million) and was replaced by the very similar commodore 64 (which is still the biggest selling computer ever with estimates of over 20 million sold between 19 and becoming available to but again soon, watch this space).īut that’s all irrelevant for the moment. It all began on Christmas Day 1982 when I was lucky enough to find this box and its exciting contents under the Christmas tree. Me outside the Apple Store in Newcastle this year, organising a VIC20 ‘flash mob’… of one…
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