Jan Davidson is the first to admit that her goal wasn't to rule over a $40 million educational software empire: She just wanted to be a good teacher.
Thanks to Jan Davidson, there is hope for the mathematically challenged.
Founder and president of Davidson & Associates, Inc. in Torrance, California, the former high school and college teacher has introduced more than 30 IBM/PC and Macintosh-based software products over the past eleven years, including the Math Blaster learning series, designed to teach math fundamentals. At last count, more than one million copies of products in the series have been sold. "If I've done anything," Davidson says, "I've taken away math phobia from thousands and thousands of kids."
But kids aren't the only ones who've gotten better with numbers. Sales of Davidson & Associates's math, reading, writing, science, and history titles - plus its games - added up, in 1992 alone, to US$40 million, making the company one of the top three makers of educational software, along with The Learning Company and Broderbund Software.
Educational software is big news these days, with the Software Publishers Association reporting that sales of home educational software grew 47 percent in 1992 - more than three times the average 14 percent growth for the other software categories the association tracks. And things promise to get even better, with higher growth expected as more consumers find powerful PCs and Macs, now being offered at less than $1,000.
Although Davidson may be viewed as a visionary today, she's the first to admit that her goal wasn't to rule over a multimillion dollar educational software empire: She just wanted to be a good teacher.
"I was always trying to find things that I could do with my students to make them more involved in the learning process. The more kids are involved, the more they are engaged, the more they are going to learn and the more successful you are going to be as a teacher," said the 49-year-old Davidson, who holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Maryland. "When the PC hit the market, I thought, 'Why couldn't the computer be used?' Because of its nature, you have to interact with it. It responds to you and requires your attention. No one sits in front of a computer passively."
In 1978, when Davidson bought an Apple II, there was no software available that could benefit her students at Upward Bound, the nonprofit learning center she founded in the late 1970s to offer after-school tutoring. So she designed her own teaching tools, starting with Speed Reader, a game designed to increase - what else? - reading speed (she hired a programmer to code according to her own design specifications). Math Blaster and Word Attack, a vocabulary game, followed. All three programs were distributed through a catalog business run by Apple Computer.
When that catalog folded, Davidson, with encouragement from her husband, Robert (who serves as chairman and CEO of her company), decided to market the products herself. But while Davidson & Associates may have had a fortuitous birth in 1982, it's success has been anything but an accident.
"There were lots of companies that came into the business with much deeper pockets and with seasoned management teams, but they failed," said Ken Wasch, executive director of the Software Publishers Association in Washington, DC. For the past eight years the association has counted Davidson among its board members and, for one year, as its president.
Davidson has built her company into a 300-employee educational publishing empire. Using what she calls a "studio approach," Davidson has kept the company's titles fresh by publishing programs written by smaller, more nimble startups. In April 1993, Davidson & Associates stock began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol DAVD.
"Her unsuccessful competitors - driven by lots of marketing MBAs - didn't hear the music of what teachers wanted," Wasch says. "Unlike those competitors, she is a teacher and understands how educational software is used in an educational setting. She got close to the customers, watching how products are used and getting direct feedback that was not filtered through lots of levels. y
"Anybody who sees her as just a sweet teacher from the Midwest," Wasch adds, "will underestimate her. If you're her competitor, you'll underestimate her at your own peril."
Through her involvement in the Software Publishers Association, which, among many other issues, lobbies at the state level for educational resources such as computers, Davidson has been a vocal and visible advocate of technology as a learning aid in schools. "Anyone who's seen what a kid can do when let loose on a well-designed computer tool has seen the future," she said in her keynote speech at the National Educational Computing Conference in June '93.
To make that vision of the future a reality, her company has embarked on a new strategy: to develop curriculum-based, multimedia products designed for schools. "The only way in the early days to sell products was to offer supplemental products like Math Blaster, because most of the software purchased was used at home to supplement what was going on in the classroom," Davidson says. "What is happening now is that teachers are feeling more and more comfortable with the technology, and they're saying they would use these tools more if they addressed the whole curriculum; if they addressed the core rather than just the supplemental."
Are curriculum-based software systems really the next thing? Educators in California, Florida, and Texas think so. Davidson & Associates started work this year on a $1.2 million development effort, funded by those three states, to create a state-of-the-art multimedia history and social science system. Called Vital Links, the system is being developed with the Los Angeles County Office of Education and Addison-Wesley Publishing.
"What is exciting to me about technology in education is that not only can you learn what you want, at your own pace, but you can learn in a variety of modalities," Davidson says. "It lets you go from a very teacher-centered approach to a very learner-centered approach.... We're giving students tools to build their own view of history and teachers components from which they can build and present information to students."
As an example, Davidson described how in one prototype demonstration using Vital Links technology, a teacher asked students to use multimedia tools to create a public service announcement defending why people should vote, assuming that there was no Bill of Rights guaranteeing citizens that right. "That's thinking about things - history, the Bill of Rights - from a different perspective. That's exciting."
Of course, over the years Davidson has had to defend educational software against those who label it entertainment or worse, "edutainment," rather than education. Surprisingly, it is parents, and not teachers, who have been the most skeptical of educational software, she says. "Sometimes parents say, 'It was hard for me when I was in school. Are you doing this to make it more simple for them?' I'm not doing to make it more simple or hard. We're doing it to make them more engaged and interested in learning.
"We all have an innate desire to learn," Davidson says. "It's a positive, enjoyable, wonderful experience. It's a shame that we have evolved an educational system that makes kids hate to go to school. It's a natural desire to learn. Why shouldn't it be fun?"
Davidson & Associates: +1 (310) 793 0600.
