“The [U.S.] Department of Education had a program of giving grants [EDEA Title VII research grants] for research to schools that were being more effective in the teaching of English as a Second Language in the curriculum. And we had the idea that maybe we could teach kids who needed English as a second language on the computer. So by this time, I had a good friend in the Advanced Placement English teacher. She and I and the guy in charge of language in the Denver schools, who was worthless, decided to apply for a grant from the Department of Education to teach the kids from Laotian, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Hmong [families], English, because Denver was being inundated with these students. Denver Public Schools applied for the English as a Second Language grant from the United States Department of Education and they asked me to be the Director of the grant, if we won. They had credentials from me already from Atari and from the carpool program.
“Lo and behold, we won a $1.5 million [grant] and we were going to teach them, first, about how people lived in our country, what a bus driver did, what a man who works behind a meat counter does, what a teacher does. What Americans do when they work. And the way we were going to teach it was that we were going to draw a — Apples had just come out — and we were going to use the machine’s ability to draw a picture. And we would explain the picture in English and, if they didn’t understand, they [would] hit a picture and a screen would come up in their language, explaining what we are explaining in English. And the idea being that, eventually, the words that explained what the American do for work would become clear to the foreign student.
“There was not much you could do with a foreign student who entered school two months late or three months late, so we got the four Apples and the idea of what we’re going to do put together and then it was left up to me to pay the salaries of the translators and all that stuff. And the programmers — my kids — would do the programming. I had $1.50 to pay each kid an hour.”