Apple Computer UK Ltd is currently demonstrating its soon-to-be-available educational software for the Macintosh LC at the three-day BETT ’91 (information technology for education) exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The annual event, which has been running for seven years, is sponsored by the British Educational Equipment Association and BBC Educational Computing and Technology, and was opened yesterday by Michael Fallon MP, the minister of state at the Department of Trade and Industry whose brief includes computers for schools. Mr Fallon reported that the government sees laptop computers, interactive video and CD-ROM as the main potential investment areas of the future. The government is currently supporting a two-year programme, led by TV South and Nottingham University, to develop interactive mathematics applications on video disk, and it was also announced that the government is about to embark on a UKP500,000 pilot scheme to develop educational applications based on CD-ROM. Apple’s presence at BETT this year is based on its new low-end Macintoshes, the Classic and the LC, which schools can now realistically afford. In 1989, Apple invested between UKP1m and UKP2m in what it calls the Renaissance Project – a collaborative multimedia venture to develop educational CD-ROM based applications. The first results of this project will be available to schools over the next few weeks and include a Shakespeare disk – a video of the play Twelfth Night integrated with graphics and text. The Shakespeare disk, developed by Graham Howard of Coventry University, costs around UKP80 and runs on the LC – which will be the main environment for this year’s batch of educational applications, says Apple.
