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"I sold all my stock for a dollar a share," TLC founder Ann McCormick said a few years later.
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At $3.6 billion, the deal was so huge and ill-conceived that, to this day, business students read about it as case study of what not to do. To those who had been pioneers of the emerging learning software field, the deal also typified a kind of profit-driven model that all but ruined their dreams of using computers to help kids enjoy learning. The resulting company became part of a bigger acquisition by toy giant Mattel Inc. Then a larger outfit named The Learning Company (TLC) swallowed up Broderbund. It was also tremendous fun.ĭuring the decade or so in which it was widely available, Zoombinis developed a cult following, mostly outside the classroom.
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In reality, Zoombinis took players through the step-by-step process of learning how to create and use a database.
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But the world is full of these big people who tell them to sort." The kids shouldn't have to sort themselves by feature - they don't believe in that. And if you think about it, rules in a kid's world are arbitrary. Our joke was that they were knee-high to everything they met. "We were probably plumbing our own self-consciousness, but over time we realized that the Zoombinis were kids," Osterweil said. But first they had to get past oppressive and picky overlords who wanted their pizza served just-so and their Zoombinis sorted by hair style, eye shape and nose color, among other arbitrary indicators. What emerged was a candy-colored CD-ROM adventure title that invited players to lead a beleaguered tribe of blue eggplant-shaped creatures out of slavery and into a new land. She and a friend spent hours playing with it. The mother came back to Osterweil and Hancock and asked: Can you make a game out of this? Then, a few weeks later, during a "family day" at Broderbund, a product manager's 15-year-old daughter happened upon the Snoids on a computer desktop. In 1993, Hancock took the little digital toy to Broderbund, an educational software company near San Francisco that had already scored a hit with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They liked it but weren't sure what to do with it.
It turned out to be a really interesting space to think about multiple variables and independent variables." They created a race of creatures called Snoids, with hundreds of possible variations. Hancock had also developed Tabletop Jr., a children's version, and soon he and Osterweil began playing with the idea of creating a database tool built around bits of data that kids could easily digest and manipulate, such as pizza toppings and facial and body features. Which is all very interesting when you consider that Zoombinis was actually an adaptation of Tabletop, a data visualization tool developed in the early 1990s by Chris Hancock, one of Osterweil's colleagues at the Cambridge, Mass.-based non-profit Technical Education Research Centers (TERC). "It was never to say, 'These are things kids must learn and we know we must teach them in this sequence.' We really were thinking about it as an entertainment game." "The goal was never to be curricular," Osterweil said. They allowed users to indulge their curiosity without the nagging requirement that they make their kids more competitive in school. Games of the era, including Zoombinis, reflected that. "You just thought, 'There are interesting things I can do with this,'" he said. If you had a PC, you weren't yet using it to play all your CDs, pay your bills and telecommute. Only curious hobbyists were willing to invest $1,000 or more in the big, bulky units, said Scot Osterweil, one of Zoombinis' original co-developers. Launched by the software firm Broderbund in 1996, the game appeared at a key time: just as computers were showing up in American homes, but before they became ubiquitous.Īt the time, PCs were expensive. If it's possible to have nostalgic feelings for a piece of software, Zoombinis is the one to love.
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6 on the Android and Apple app stores, with plans to release it soon for PC and Mac users. Well, the strange little logic game is back.
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Then it disappeared, its code languishing as a series of corporate owners neglected it and its former users discovered the charms and distractions of the World Wide Web. The beloved CD-ROM game appeared in 1996 and stuck around for a decade. If you grew up in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably encountered that hallowed imaginary place at a friend's house after school while playing the cult classic computer game Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.
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