In preceding chapters we have seen how the quality and availability of software, parental encouragement and assistance, and mothers' reactions to computers influenced children's computer use. We now take up the school use of computers and consider how it affected children's home academic computing and educational computing in general. Children's and parents' reports, as well as school visits by some fieldworkers, revealed that the schools emphasized computer literacy and programming. School computer use – at least for most of the children in our study – was not infused into traditional curriculum subjects nor were children exposed to subject-related academic computing in school. These school experiences had an important impact on what children did at home.

In this chapter we discuss school computer use, parental and child reactions to school use, the extent to which teachers communicated with parents about computers, and how these affected home educational computing. We argue that the school's emphasis on computers had an important impact on the home academic computing of the children in our study as well as on their home educational computing in general.