British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering name

[totakeke]

Everybody remembers Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro, I was scared to death of the witch! You can even play it to this day. However, there's some games I can't even find the name of, let alone any information or ways to play them

There was one about finding the Mary Rose. Someone else remembers it but doesn't know the name http://www.adventuresinretro.co.uk/?page_id=19

The next one you are defending a hill in Roman Britain, it's text and turn based

Finally a game where you are finding roman artifacts on a dig site from an overhead view. If you find a particular artefact you get sent back to roman times and it becomes an adventure game in three quarters perspective (kind of like Head over Heels and Knightlore) and you are on the screen disguised as a slave and have to go around talking to people to try to figure out how to get back to your own time.

I think the first two were on the BBC Micro, the second one was a lot more advanced but still would have been in the 80s, did schools upgrade to more powerful acorn systems back then? I remember it being able to play Lemmings and Professor Moriarty.

[totakeke]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

The roman artifacts game turns out to be Arcventure: The Romans. It's been remade for the PC and is still for sale http://shop.sherston.com/avro-mlt-cdrm-1.html I don't know how I'd get hold of the BBC Micro version. 1 down, 2 to go.

[Richard1978]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

There are a few BBC Micro emulators & sites with games to download for them, but often they don't have any educational programs.

[mrgreedy]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

I don't remember those, but I do remember some other educational programs that we used at school around 1985. One was a treasure hunt of some sort, with maps and clues. The other was a very simple flight simulator. Not 3D or particularly graphical, but it was more about navigation. It definitely started with a flight to Reykjavik, don't remember much else.

[spuggybridge]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

If you type "stairway to hell' into google there is a now defunct retro BBC B website that has a lot of cover scans, you might just find what you are looking for there

[Richard1978]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

Stairway to hell is very good for games not sure about educational programs

[ainwee]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

The Romans. It's been remade for the PC and is still for I don't know how I'd get hold of the BBC Micro version. 1 down, 2 to go.????

[oldfartuk]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

BBC Micro was the worst dead end in computing ever. Whoever persuaded all the schools in the Uk to buy a computer that was completely incompatible with the rest of the planet was a genius salesman. It took some schools until the turn of the century to finally dump them and by DOS compatible computers. In doing so they crippled an entire generation by lumbering them with a computer skill set that was entirely useless once they left school, and then had to learn all over again, with either Windows, Mac or Unix.

[Richard1978]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

Don't forget most 8-bit computers used Basic so you could transfer some skills accross.

The first PC's came out at the same times & cost at least 4 times as much, with no guarantee they would last.

Even PC's weren't standard in the business world until the 1990s, with companies choosing Wang or DEC systems depending on what work needed doing.

[darren]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

Yes i remember using the bbc micro at primary school but never got to play games on it as far as i can remember.

We had the computers sitting outside our classroom at the top of the flight of stairs.

[Arran]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

BBC Micro was the worst dead end in computing ever. Whoever persuaded all the schools in the Uk to buy a computer that was completely incompatible with the rest of the planet was a genius salesman. It took some schools until the turn of the century to finally dump them and by DOS compatible computers. In doing so they crippled an entire generation by lumbering them with a computer skill set that was entirely useless once they left school, and then had to learn all over again, with either Windows, Mac or Unix.

I dispute this one. Back in the early 1980s there was no standard for computers in the real world so there were good reasons to develop a computer for educational institutions. The PC didn't really become a standard for office computers until the late 1980s and various other non-PC compatible professional computers were used for applications like industrial control or video production at the time. The PC running DOS was technically a lousy computer, out of date for its time, and far less suitable for educational institutions than the offerings of Acorn. It only succeeded as a professional computer because it was from IBM and was easy for other manufacturers to clone. In fact the PC only really made inroads into the home computing market in the early 1990s after the release of Windows 3.

There was no real strategy or national curriculum for the use of computers during the era of the BBC micro so what kids learned at school very much depended on what school they attended. Some schools did programming, others didn't. Some schools had computer lessons, others tried to integrate computers into existing lessons like maths or geography. Some schools used computers as word processors, others condemned the practice. In the mid 1990s the strategy was that computers should be primarily used for office type work which was the core of the then largely non-technical ICT curriculum. I remember my school replacing its Acorn Archimedes with PCs running Windows 95 and 98. The curriculum changed again after 2010 and office work largely replaced with computer science where kids learn about the workings of hardware and software.

[Richard1978]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

I remember my secondary school buying Acorn Archimedes, & when I asked the IT teacher why they had been chosen instead of PCs he said when the put the order in Windows wasn't standard on PCs & they had considered DOS too user unfriendly.

[Arran]

Re: British Educational games of the 80s, BBC Micro and Acorn, need help remembering

There wasn't a lot of educational software for the PC until the mid 1990s and much of what existed was American. Even conventional office software that ran under DOS was expensive for the time because companies could get away with charging high prices to mostly business customers.

There is still no real consensus on how computers should be used in schools.