30 Years of Tech Tools in EdTech Development

Here's a walk down memory lane of the technology platforms I used to develop educational games and simulations since I started my ed-tech company in 1994.

Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook

I started with Multimedia Toolbook by Asymetrix. It was a really good and well-refined program, The company was founded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. But it was for Windows only and Apple Macs were becoming too popular in schools to ignore so most developers jumped to Macromedia Director.

Macromedia Director

Director by Macromedia was also a great program, but not as well refined as Toolbook. I pushed the envelope with Director creating my first super-realistic business simulation. It won an award at a Macromedia developer conference.

I created all sorts of apps with it, including one that communicated with satellite data systems to identify the location of locomotives.

Adobe Director

Director was eventually acquired by Adobe. My team and I continued to use Director for many years but, to the disappointment of many, Adobe did not continue to develop the program well and their customer support was terrible. I presume they kept it alive as a cash cow to fund other projects, but I'm just speculating. All I know is that the change of ownership was not good.

Adobe Flash

Adobe also acquired Flash from another company. Adobe did invest in developing Flash further and it became a capable platform used widely around the world.

We developed several educational games and simulations with Flash. And lots of other people developed annoying websites that forced you to sit and watch Flash animations before entering the site :-)

Steve Jobs of Apple single-handedly killed Flash by banning it from Apple devices. This forced developers like us to incur very high costs to rebuild our products using other platforms. On a positive note, it did clean up those Flash websites :-)

Unity

Unity by Unity Technologies is a widely-used game development platform. It is much more complex than the platforms noted above. It is also more capable and modern (in most ways but not all). But there was a period of time when Unity apps would not run at all online — they had to be installed on your computer.

This was a serious limitation as much of the world was moving to software as a service. But web technologies were not mature enough to support Unity.

We did create a few apps with Unity and those apps are still good today. Unity continues to be a popular platform that most game developers should consider.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is the internet standard that made it possible to create more feature-rich apps that play online. It took many years for the Internet (world wide web) to mature enough for this standard to be possible.

Once all the major Internet browsers supported it, developers like us were able to build educational games and simulations without being bound to a specific software platform owned and controlled by a third party. And our users did not have to install any software as everything became playable online (software as a service).

What's Next?

Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed reality (MR), Web 3 — here is a helpful chart of these technologies I created some time ago.