Bob Albrecht

PAST ADVENTURES

Leroy Finkel was the business brain of our company called Dymax. He said we could do it if we could do it cheaply. The cheapest way we knew was to publish it in newspaper format. Inspired by Big Brother and the Holding Company, we called it People's Computer Company.

The first issue (October 1972) was created by LeRoy Finkel, Mary Jo Albrecht (now Mary Jo Bajada), Jerry Brown, Marc LeBrun, Jane Wood, Tom Albrecht (my son), and me. I was PCC's editor until fall 1976, when Phyllis Cole and Marc LeBrun took over. As Dragon Emeritus, I wrote San Andreas Fault Caper, Don Quixote Starship, Tiny Basic for Beginners, Make-Believe Computers, and Games for You to Program.

Leroy and Jerry and I wrote books, lots of books. Don Inman, Ramon Zamora, and others joined our author team. I wrote or coauthored 30+ books, including many beginner’s books about Basic. My last book was Teach Yourself Visual Basic by me and son Karl Albrecht, published in 1996. Enough! I quit writing computer books and plunged full-time into my real love: writing math & science instructional stuff for learners and teachers.

Before, during, and after PCC, I spent lots of time in classrooms, teachers’ conventions, and elsewhere -- playing games and doing hands-on math and science. Leroy and Bob Kahn and I traveled California and taught University of California Extension courses called Computers in the Classroom and Games Computers Play. I accumulated stacks of journals full of ideas and wrote columns for magazines and educational journals. I especially liked writing:

• GameMaster's Apprentice in The Rainbow
• School Is in the Heart of a Child in The Rainbow
• Your Basic Backpack in Computer Shopper
• Power Tools for Math & Science in The Computing Teacher

CURRENT ADVENTURES

• Living in Santa Rosa, California.
• Doing lots of hiking.
• Dancing and teaching Greek Folk Dancing at Papas’ Taverna, Jessie Jean’s Coffee Beans, elsewhere.
• Running events for kids in coffee houses, schools, and other places: Play Together, Learn Together, Rocket Science, et cetera, et cetera.
• With coauthor Paul Davis, writing the column Starship Gaia in Learning and Leading with Technology, the journal of the International Society for Technology in Education.
• Taking courses at Santa Rosa Junior College.
• Mentoring in Richard Zimmer's Mars Society and Mars Habitat courses at Sonoma State University. We're in our 8th semester of building communities on Mars for the year 2030. Most of our students intend to become elementary school teachers.

• Adventurer's Handbook
• Algebra Backpack
• Measurement & Modeling, including Metric Backpack
• Play Together, Learn Together
• Starship Gaia

Email: DragonFun@aol.com

Thanks to Stan Veit, founder of Computer Shopper Magazine, a smidgen of Play Together, Learn Together is at http://www.dragonfun.net/.

FUTURE ADVENTURES

Reality expands to fill the available fantasies.

Bob Albrecht