Part IV: TRS-80 Educational Software Demo

Part IV of my SepTANDY series: TJBChris' Tandy Education Connection (TEC). In this final installment, I'm diving into some the educational software offered for the TRS-80 Models I/III/4 and the Color Computer. We take a look at Third Grade Math, Color Math, Kinetic Theory, TRS-80 Color Logo, Boyle's Law, and Ernie's Magic Shapes. Each demo shows how the programs interacted with the user and has a little discussion and commentary on the state of educational software in the 1980's. While discussing Ernie's Magic Shapes, I also launch into a commentary about how screen time has changed over the generations.
Music/SFX (in order):
None. Just me jabbering.
Chapters:
Intro (0:00)
Model III - K-8 Math Series: Third Grade Math (1:42)
CoCo - Color Math (9:11)
Model III - RS Chemistry Lab Volume I - Kinetic Theory (15:44)
CoCo - TRS-80 Color Logo (19:51)
Model III - RS Chemistry Lab Volume I - Boyle's Law (26:32)
CoCo - Ernie's Magic Shapes & Sreen Time Commentary (30:44)
Outro (37:34)
I do these videos unscripted, so I apologize if the in-the-moment descriptions of things are a bit scattered. If you have any questions/comments about this video, you can find me in any of these fine locations:
The Tandy Discord Server
The CoCo Nation Discord Server
The TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) group on Facebook
The CoCo Crew Podcast group on Facebook
On the Vintage Computer Forums (vcfed.org)
The TRS-80 Models I-4/4P Group on Facebook
Tandy / Radio Shack Model II /12 / 16 / 16B / 6000 Owner's Group on Facebook
Twitter (I'm TJBChris there...)
The Level29 BBS (I'm TJBChris there, too.)
Particles BBS (Guess who I am here? Yeah, TJBChris.)
Thanks for watching!

[@CurtisBoyle]

Re: Color Logo - there ended up being 3 different Logos for the Coco, all sold by Radio Shack. Color Logo (that you showed) was available as a cartridge (which would save/load programs from cassette) or a disk, and was the earliest and most primitive release (missing some features common with most Logo's on other micros, although it did support multiple turtles which most others did not). The same authors came out with Super Logo a couple of years later that filled in some of those missing features. And then Dale Lear (of Color Baseball fame) did a much more advanced one (called D.L. Logo) that ran under OS-9, but added support for multi-voice music, joysticks, printers, the Speech/Sound cartridge (including speech support) and even the X-Pad graphics tablet. It also supported calls to the OS9 operating system itself, sentence, word and list manipulation, and higher precision math than either BASIC09 or Microsoft BASIC did.

[@TJBChris]

Hey Curtis, thanks for the detail. I completely forgot about D.L. Logo! It amazes me how many versions of logo the CoCo got. Even the original Color Logo was excellent! I need to play with D.L. Logo now.

[@geekwithsocialskills]

As always a very informative video. I'm still in aww of your Tandy Radio Shack collection of computers. As a side note your mic's signal started off wonky in this video, but it cleared up later. This is the sort of content that I've come to love from your channel 🙂

[@TJBChris]

I guess it sort of defines me now haha. The thing is, it’s one of those things I don’t know until I watch the playback, so I have to decide whether I can live with it or re-shoot. Fortunately, it was just the beginning. New batteries in the mics halfway through solved the problem 🤣

[@geekwithsocialskills]

@@TJBChris with the Radio Shack Battery of the Month Club you should have plenty of batteries on hand so this doesn't happen in the future 🙂

[@davefiddes]

Great series! Thanks for putting it together. There wasn't much TRS-80 in education in the UK so no chance of me coming across this stuff at the time. Fantastic to see it demonstrated all these years later.

[@TJBChris]

Glad you liked it! It was a fun series to put together and definitely ended up being more involved than I thought it would be. Thanks for watching!

[@waterup380]

wish we had this stuff at my school when it was first out

[@RetroGamingNook]

Great coverage for SEPTANDY 2023! If I only knew back then I would mostly have 0 tens and 2 ones these days... Also, I was sooo worried they would off the bunny if you got it wrong. Finally, I'll give a grade of A on shape skills and a grade of B on the Ernie impression. Bah-bah-bah Boo-bop, Bah-bah-bah Boo-bop, Bah-bah-bah Boo-bop Bump.

[@TJBChris]

Haha a B is better than I expected for my Ernie impression! I’d try harder at mastering it if he actually did off the bunny when you answer wrong.

[@BollingHolt]

Ha! I used to have Color Math on my CoCo2 as well! I remember that manual vividly LOL. I had the Ernie game, too, actually!

[@TJBChris]

As a kid, I would sometimes load up Color Math and do some problems…it was oddly fun in a way that school wasn’t.

[@scottbrady419]

Great video. Brings back memories. The sad part is that with today's "new" way of doing math, you'll have to rewrite your basic code for today's kids to understand it. 😂

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

"Hangman" 1992, 1000 RLX!

[@emolatur]

YOU SUNK MY TURTLE!

[@emolatur]

That... *IS* that "controversial 'new' math"