In recent weeks I’ve enjoyed considerable quality time with my preschool-aged granddaughters. They are very smart, gregarious, energetic, caring, and adventurous girls, among so many other qualities. Yes, I am biased, blessed, and very proud.

They both are very adept with their tablets, Google Cloud-based services in their home, and their many, many computer-driven toys. The three-year-old has mastered just the right cadence and intonation to achieve what she wants just about every time she makes the request, “Hey Google, find (name your favorite for-the-day pre-school animated entertainment) videos on YouTube.”

The First Computer Learning Month

Thirty-something years ago, these two may have been exactly who and why Computer Learning Month, marked each October since 1987, came to be. At the time, early in the growth of personal computing, children, students of any age, and most adults, had yet to get up-close and personal with, well, computing. So, the industry coalesced to communicate and make connections with consumers and educators about computers’ importance and opportunity in the classroom, and since then has tried to widen Computer Learning’s appeal more broadly.

In “Computer Learning Month: An Enthusiastic Start,” which appeared in the September 1987 issue of Atari Magazine and is now available at www.atarimagazines.com, the article talked up the month as “officially sanctioned by Congress and is supported by a wide-cross section of computer software and hardware companies, publishing houses, teachers, and state and national educational organizations” and that events that month would prove important as “millions of ordinary kids are using computers to develop critical-thinking abilities, academic skills and creativity.”

Donated Computers

The piece also noted that Apple, IBM, and Tandy (remember Tandy-Radio Shack?) were Computer Learning Month sponsors and would donate computers to the many contests involved in the month, at the time. Of course, those three companies might just have wanted to dominate the education market, don’t you know?

Now, in the 2020s, Computer Learning Month should be marked to “encourage those who aren’t familiar with computers for reasons ranging from lack of opportunity to just being part of a past generation to get in a learn what computers can do,” according to daysoftheyear.com. Most days I find it difficult to get, go, or do anything without a computer, because computers are involved in producing or operating or monitoring just about everything.

Still A Learner

While my grandgirls lean into digital nativeland, I am in awe of their skills and computing fluency—and I consider computing now and back in the day. I became a business technology journalist just before Computer Learning Month came to be. Not a student, I was very much among a professional who needed and wanted to learn all about computing and technologies. Computing and technology rapidly changed how publishing—and every other industry—conducted business.  As an editor and publisher at what was then CMP Media in New York, we not only learned about the newest tech and forthcoming computers, we conveyed the information to the world. We attempted to provide insights and envision impact. We talked about how computing and communications would—and did—converge. And we tracked the Internet, from early government entity to commercial and commerce force. And more.

Computer Learning Month may not make as much noise now as it did in its early years. But a Computer Learning Month column written by Sharon Hall, a teacher, and Presidential Award of Excellence in Math Teaching, and published last year, is very meaningful and relevant for kids and parents, students and adults of every age as we thoughtfully, responsibly access, absorb and use communications, content and connections via computers, every day. As Hall advocated:

“Today’s students are digital natives. [They] understand how to use computers to find and share information, making it vital to teach students how to evaluate and create media using five critical communications skills: understanding access, analysis, evaluation, creation and use of appropriate actions.”

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