Many school have computers, but that doesn’t mean the students are getting the most out of them. Maintaining a computer and installing software can be a difficult process, and for schools that don’t have the time, surely there must be a way to make better use of the machines!
The goals:
- To convert otherwise neglected computers into effective teaching tools.
- To do so with a single floppy disk and zero effort beyond simply inserting it and turning on the PC.
DOWNLOAD “PB-LEARNING 1.1” FLOPPY DISK IMAGE HERE
What do do with this file after you download it:
You will need special software to make the “PB-Learning” floppy disk. On Windows I use RawWrite. Google “RawWrite Mac” or whatever if you don’t use Windows. Run the program, browse for the file you downloaded, then make the disk.
That’s it. Put it in the disk, turn on the computer, follow the self-explanatory menu.
Here’s what’s included:
- Animated John: a fun keyboard banger for kids who want nothing more than to break the keyboard. Introduces words with pictures.
- Vobabumonkey: a picture/word matcher with a funny monkey as your host.
- Word Trix: a little more grown-up set of games, of the “fill in the missing letter based on the picture” variety
- Counting with Apples: count with integers, small numbers, then big, then spell numbers as you count!
- Animal Math: counting, number order, add/subtract.
- Googol Math Games: math for all for operations, cleverly embedded into three different fun games.
- Number Munchers Tribute: Yeah, Number Munchers. Disproportionately hard compared to the English games. Might get cut to help balance it out.
- TMS Games: Typing games, probably the most creative I’ve seen.
- Billy Bear Learns Sign Language: what it sounds like. This game lets you use a mouse!
- Billy 2.21: no relation to the bear, just a chatbot to kill time if the kids meander to the bottom of the menu.
- Donald Duck’s Playground: Donald needs to get odd jobs to make money to buy playground equipment. Simple financial math.
Technical stuff
Here’s how the disk basically works. Specific programs are named if I spent a lot of time finding the right one, which might save someone else the time I lost…
- FreeDOS bare minimum boot. Less overhead (disk space usage) than MS-DOS.
- Allocate some RAM into a ramdrive (I settled on xmsdsk because I could specify a drive letter instead of having to find it after DOS assigns it)
- Copy command.com to ramdrive and initialize
- Extract ZIP file on floppy to ramdrive (using TUnz—absolutely tiny—2.5K unzipper!)
- Load mouse driver (ctmouse), menus, everything else right off of ramdrive, never using the hard disk and no looking back to the floppy.
Do whatever you want with the disk. Change it, redistribute it, but you need to follow the rules of all the contained programs. I have provided links to all the educational software downloads in their original ZIP files, so check them out if you need details.
Changelog:
1.1:
- Replaced Treasure Hunt Math with Googol Games 2.0
- Added Donald Duck’s Playground
- Replaced “Medley” menu with “EnviMenu,” which has mouse support.
- Much faster boot time: now copies ZIP to ramdrive before extracting
- Lowered overhead on the disk to make room for more valuable stuff:
- Used UPX in general to shrink EXE and COM files.
- Using smaller FreeDOS command.com and kernel.sys files
- Switched from himem.exe to the smaller fdxms.sys
- For older games, switched from SLOWDOWN to the smaller MOSLO