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In 1997, I quit my job as a university professor of Psychology to devote myself to educational software. Created Equal: Sex and Gender was the culmination of that effort. I went back to part-time teaching at a community college and later started teaching Mac classes at an adult school. My students were older, many in their 70s and 80s, and hadn't spent much time with a computer before this class. Very basic information, like how to open or save a document, would fly by. I also noticed that, while trying to get the class to perform tasks together, students would click wildly and end up in very different places. After the many phone calls and emails I received asking me to go over something I'd covered in class, I decided to produce tutorials my students could take home to remind them of lessons they'd learned in class.
I envisioned simple quicktime movies but quickly realized there needed to be some organization and this after some twists and turns led to TeachMac. Once I realized that it had commercial potential, I gave the product to my company, Created Equal, which could develop it and use it to further its goal of social justice through education.
Revolution allowed me, a completely untrained programmer, to go from vision to product. Obviously, I have to also credit Apple for Hypercard and the Mac for without both of those, I would never have even embarked down the path. Still, it was the flexibility, robustness and ease of Revolution that made it possible - that and lots of help from developer community. Even when I realized that I needed professional help, this was only cost effective because of the rapid development possible with Revolution.
Jacqueline Landman Gay of Hyperactive Software, the firm I engaged to complete the project, said this about the development process:
"TeachMac is heavily dependent on interactions with a server on the internet. It was dead simple to implement this with Revolution, which requires only one line of script to retrieve basic data from virtually anywhere. For more complex interactions, such as downloading multimedia on demand, Revolution's supplied libURL library made a complicated task very easy. I don't know any other language that makes it this simple. There seems to be a library or a command set for just about everything; for example, the built-in encryption features allowed me to write a registration key generator in no time, and the ability to use Revolution as a CGI on the server allowed us to send these keys to customers without any human interaction. "
In August of 2006, we launched TeachMac to the public. The response has been better than we'd hoped. We have more than 50 authors making tutorials, 150 modules, and tens of thousands of users.
Obviously, the real excitement came last May when we sold the engine that drives the TeachMac/TeachIT system for $2 Million. That was less than a year after we launched the product.
Our goal from the beginning was to promote social justice through education. TeachMac did two things for us. We could try to address the digital divide by providing low cost (even free) tutorials to schools who needed them. It also allowed us to fund the Oasis Project.
The Oasis Project is a long term shelter for women survivors of domestic violence whose lives were at risk, and for their children. Our goal is to create a center that is self sustaining so that the unpredictability of politics and economics will not determine whether or not the service remains available. Unlike traditional shelters, such a center carries a huge cost to create. We've committed the entirety of the sale, including $1 Million in back salary, to the effort.
Using Revolution is what has made this all possible: it's why TeachMac works the way it does, why so many people have been able to learn and teach about computers skills, why we had an engine for TeachMac that was worth selling, and is really why we're able to even think about creating the Oasis Project. |
