In reality, Zoombinis took players through the step-by-step process of learning how to create and use a database. But the world is full of these big people who tell them to sort." The kids shouldn't have to sort themselves by feature - they don't believe in that. And if you think about it, rules in a kid's world are arbitrary. Our joke was that they were knee-high to everything they met. "We were probably plumbing our own self-consciousness, but over time we realized that the Zoombinis were kids," Osterweil said. But first they had to get past oppressive and picky overlords who wanted their pizza served just-so and their Zoombinis sorted by hair style, eye shape and nose color, among other arbitrary indicators. What emerged was a candy-colored CD-ROM adventure title that invited players to lead a beleaguered tribe of blue eggplant-shaped creatures out of slavery and into a new land. She and a friend spent hours playing with it. The mother came back to Osterweil and Hancock and asked: Can you make a game out of this? Then, a few weeks later, during a "family day" at Broderbund, a product manager's 15-year-old daughter happened upon the Snoids on a computer desktop. In 1993, Hancock took the little digital toy to Broderbund, an educational software company near San Francisco that had already scored a hit with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They liked it but weren't sure what to do with it. It turned out to be a really interesting space to think about multiple variables and independent variables." They created a race of creatures called Snoids, with hundreds of possible variations. Hancock had also developed Tabletop Jr., a children's version, and soon he and Osterweil began playing with the idea of creating a database tool built around bits of data that kids could easily digest and manipulate, such as pizza toppings and facial and body features. Which is all very interesting when you consider that Zoombinis was actually an adaptation of Tabletop, a data visualization tool developed in the early 1990s by Chris Hancock, one of Osterweil's colleagues at the Cambridge, Mass.-based non-profit Technical Education Research Centers (TERC).
"It was never to say, 'These are things kids must learn and we know we must teach them in this sequence.' We really were thinking about it as an entertainment game."
"The goal was never to be curricular," Osterweil said. They allowed users to indulge their curiosity without the nagging requirement that they make their kids more competitive in school. Games of the era, including Zoombinis, reflected that.
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