Can Computers Be Considered Educational Toys
The best in educational toys during the 1980s was surely the personal computer. Probably not known to most parents at the time, personal computers were poised to completely take over the world in another ten years, and having one in the house could give one’s child a headstart on the brave new world of tomorrow.
Actually, it has so transpired that many of today’s positions in information technology are indeed staffed by people whose early fascination with computers has now lead to careers creating software, setting up hardware, or managing networks.
Unfortunately in the case of many others, however, such educational toys became nothing more than a home arcade. Of course, the scope of genres offered encompassed more than just simple shoot-’em-ups, and entertainment by itself was but one category among others like productivity (accounting software like VisiCalc) and art (greeting card makers like The Print Shop), but for the many kids who owned a computer during the eighties, it was all about games, games, games.
What a lost opportunity, if there ever was one! It was a great tragedy, too, for the parents who in all earnesty believed that they were buying educational toys, for computers were not low cost back then!
Even the popular Commodore 64, with a floppy disk drive, monitor, and printer, ran about nine hundred dollars – during a period when pizza was less than a buck a slice and most comic books no more than seventy-five cents!
That’s more than fifteen hundred dollars in today’s money, adjusting for inflation; that’s a lot for a CPU, monitor, and printer. That’s a lot for a glorified gaming console. The computer is the most fascinating example of an “educational toy” ever in history. It is the only educational toy that is truly both, and yet could very easily be used exclusively as just one or the other.