As we have seen, the perceived quality and availability of educational software had an effect on home educational computing among the children in our study. The degree of parental leadership, the role of gender, and school emphasis also contributed to the lack of home effort. Children's strong preference for games was another important force that kept children from engaging in educational home computing and increased the likelihood of their lack of receptivity to such endeavors.

It is common knowledge that children (as well as adults) are intrigued by computer games. Educators have tried to analyze this fascination (Greenfield, 1984; Malone, 1984; Perkins, 1983) and journalists frequently write about the widespread interest in video games.

In this chapter we compare the children's clear attraction to the playing of computer games to their rejection of academic computing. We discuss some of the reasons for these positive and negative reactions and examine how the conceptions parents and children had of computers may have affected reactions to computer games and to educational software.

Game playing was the primary computer activity for most of the children in our study. Fieldworkers frequently observed that “the children spend as much time as they can playing with the games” and “they seem to gravitate toward games.”