Rocky's Boots (1982)an educational game for the Apple II and PC by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm. An early educational simulation game, which showed how computers could be effectively employed in schools. Rocky's Boots was an educational game which employed an interactive, graphical simulation for teaching. It allowed 10- to 12-year-old students to build simple digital logic circuits to solve logical puzzles. The circuits were represented with the traditional circuit symbols for AND gates, OR gates, NOT gates, and flipflops, but with the colors orange and white superimposed to show the state (1 or 0) of each component. The logic signals could be seen propagating through the circuits. It looked like liquid orange fire flowing through transparent pipes. The components could be plugged together on-screen to build the circuits, and thus Rocky's Boots was a "construction kit". I called it an "electronic Tinkertoy set". Rocky's Boots won Software of the Year awards in 1982-83 from InfoWorld magazine (runner-up), Learning magazine, and Parent's Choice magazine. It also received the Gold Award from the Software Publisher's Association. Rocky's Boots was the flagship product of The Learning Company (TLC) at its initial launch in 1982. TLC was founded in 1980, received venture capital in 1981, had an initial public offering in 1992, and was acquired in 1995. The founders of TLC were Warren Robinett, Ann McCormick Piestrup, Leslie Grimm, and Teri Perl. |