September 1996, Hillsboro, Oregon – Mrs. Jacobs has informed us that we will need to learn the name of every country in the world this year, and we are also expected to spell them correctly. Students who score at least 90% on each regional test will be exempt from the final exam, which is even scarier as it will cover all regions at once.
I am terrified
Not too long ago I scribbled the following message across the front of my journal to my parents:
“Yoo can red if yoo donet poot misspeelt werds on my speeling list”.
To say my spelling was poor would be an understatement. How was I going to pass this class? How was I going to prepare for this final exam when even good performance (let alone joining the 90% club) was clearly so far out of reach?
More than one teacher that fall asked me if I had a learning disability. I didn’t know what that meant. Mrs. Jacobs, seeing how much I struggled with spelling, offered me the accommodation of not counting the first 50% of my misspellings against me. That took a little pressure off. The freshman counselor suggested typing as a learning strategy for spelling.
My parents created a typing program for me in MS Access that quizzed me on the states of the Union and providences of Canada. I practiced until I knew where they all were on my blank practice map and could spell them all correctly most of the time. I scored 97% on that regional test. I couldn’t believe it, and that is when my dream of writing educational software for others began, so I could share this success with others.
The first edition of the program, written by me, was called DigiFlash and was written in Visual Basic. I sold it for $13 at the Kinton Grange Holiday Bazaar, in approximately 1999, and I distributed it on sets of three 3 and a half inch floppy disks. My customers had lots of requests for me, like read aloud technology, an integrated map, etc, which were far beyond my programming skills at the time, and I was discouraged. The original program does, amazingly, still run on my Windows 11 computer, so if you want to try it out, it’s available for download. The theme was “rainbow” even back then.