Computers: Tools in the Hands of Kids

When Angie Nolting learned to use a computer at the Ortonville, Minn., high school last year, she went far beyond basic programming. Mastering an electronic work-sheet program called VisiCalc, the 16-year-old junior built a financial model that showed which livestock operations on her parents' 40-acre farm were no longer profitable, and why. By surveying farms in the area to compare feed costs, weight gain per animal and other variables, Angie discovered that the family's flock of 50 sheep was overfed. Guided by her data, the Noltings cut back on feed outlays. Although the threat of foreclosure forced the family to sell off the sheep and their 40 head of Hereford cattle last December, Angie won a Future Farmers of America prize for her computer model and a free trip last month to Washington.

As schools reopen this month, the number of computers in U.S. classrooms has reached some 1 million (up from 630,000 last year). More and more of them will be used to teach the sort of practical skills that Angie found profitable: financial modeling, data-base management and word processing. Explains Marc Tucker, director of a Carnegie Corp. study on the subject: "Increasingly, schools view computers as intellectual assistants, as tools in the hands of kids, not as things to be programmed or to deliver instructional material."

The most popular use for computers is as word processors. In high school English and business departments that have computers, two-thirds of the teachers are using programs like the Bank Street Writer (300,000 sold) to spare at least some of their students the burden of recopying entire compositions in order to make substantive changes. Also growing in popularity are filing programs and electronic encyclopedias. Scholastic Inc. this year is publishing 15 sets of floppy disks crammed with facts from history, science and language arts. By learning how to cull files for, say, information about major treaties signed by American Indian leaders of the 19th century, students can develop both computer and social-studies skills. Says Walter Koetke, Scholastic's director of technology: "We're responding to the good teachers who say, 'If you want me to use the computer in social studies, you have to show me how it relates.' "

Such clarity of purpose represents a notable change. When computers were first introduced into American schools in the 1960s, they were used the way filmstrips and learning machines had been: to present lessons that progressed $ at a pace consistent with a student's ability. Even today a lively market exists for programs that prepare students for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or drill them on the multiplication table. But software manufacturers have been less successful in attempts to transfer textbooks onto floppy disks. Texts, after all, usually cost less than $25 and can be used year after year. Most computerized education programs, by contrast, cost $50 to $100 and provide, at best, only a few hours of enrichment.