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The Aspex Software story:
Aspex Software started out in 1994 with the development of Spex and
tabs educational software programs for schools and both programs became
popular very quickly. Of course, we had the advantage that there were
not so many educational software titles around at the time and both Spex
and tabs quickly found their way into a software hungry education
market.
It's an amazing tribute to the simple design of this software that
both Spex and tabs are still being sold today and are more popular than
ever.
In a nutshell, Spex is used by children to design rooms and other
places. They drag items of pre-made furniture into a room and view it in
the bird's eye view and in a 3D view; budgets, graphs etc are included
in the software.
In the tabs software one draws cuboids, pyramids, prisms and other
shapes and these are joined together on the screen to make a 3D model.
The nets are printed out so the tabs model on the computer can be made
in to a real world model with paper, card and glue.
Buyers of either program, particularly Spex shouldn't expect to see an
all singing all dancing software program with flashing lights and
shoot'em'up. In contrast a main reason for the popularity of Spex has
been its simple and modest style, which means that a teacher can put
Spex in front of a whole class of pupils and they all know how to use
it! This has been one of the many benefits of the software in schools.
Teachers love Spex and the children love Spex too!
Spex was first published for Acorn Computers which were very popular
until around the mid 1990's when the share of Acorn computers in schools
started to diminish in favour of PC's which had become the mainstream in
business.
The rapid conversion of Spex to work on PC's secured the continuity
of its use in schools as they ramped up the expansion of IT in their
classrooms. Spex thrived on the PC in schools to become one of the most
popular educational software programs around, alongside other successful
programs from the UK's original developers like
Topologika with their
music box program, Kudlian
Soft with
DataSweet, and
4Mation with their Maths,
Literacy and Spelling programs. All of these educational software companies continue to grow their
range of products today, ten years later!
Spex found its usefulness in several curriculum areas in education,
including Design Technology, ICT and Mathematics, all under the guise of
a room designer.
We try not to market it as just a room designer though, rather, the
room design aspect of Spex is a cover story to get children to grapple
with design, spatial awareness, money, budgets and dimensions, mapping
and much more.
Quite early in its development Spex was even recognised by the ICT
agency as the ideal bridge into the abstract area of spreadsheet
modelling! And all this learning is happening
while children are just having fun designing their favourite bedroom and
lots of other places.
In 2007 even though there are now thousands of educational software
titles in the market, Spex still prospers! Marketing nowadays is a
different story however, and much harder, the larger companies have
raised the game in terms of quality and quantity of sales material and
schools are bombarded with a spectacular array of new and fantastic
educational software to choose from. |
Spex continues to benefit from its long term
popularity because most of the sales, according to our research are made
by word of mouth, and that must be the greatest testament to any
product.
Teachers, parents and children buy Spex because they like it; Teachers
like Spex because of the benefits it provides in the classroom combined
with a short learning curve to get to grips with a new software, and
parents and children buy the software because they love it, it's simple
but so much fun!
Spex might be dead simple but it has captured the imagination of
several generations of school children, some of whom will be buying Spex
for their own children as the software is developed during the next few
years.
Spex has gained a real foothold in the educational software market and has endeared itself to
thousands of teachers and children.
The story behind tabs is different to that of Spex but very similar in
one respect; tabs is also one of the longest established educational
software products ever developed.
tabs, like Spex, was first developed for the Acorn computer and was
rapidly converted to PC as a matter of survival in the 1990's when
schools switched. The development to put tabs on the PC was timely, for
its release coincided with a contract to supply the software to 7000
schools in the UK!
tabs development on the PC resulted from the persistent lobbying of a
North American company, The
KnowledgeTree inc, which was champing at the bit to see tabs
software on their computers.
The KnowledgeTree soon put its money where its mouth was and started
winning orders for tabs in Canada and in America. Before long tabs was
being used successfully in thousands of schools on the American
continent and some large education orders ensued. The biggest
contracts were to make tabs available to 5400 schools in the Province of
Ontario and 2200 in the State of Sao Paulo! tabs is found in other hot
spots around America, and we are really pleased to see tabs installed
into over 300 schools in New York!
tabs is popular in lots of different schools, primary, secondary and
special needs; it seems that some youngsters who have difficulty in some
learning areas can adapt to the relative complexity of 3D modelling with
more ease than most.
The attraction of tabs for the home user is found in its ability to
display the unfolded shapes on the screen, as nets, and to print these
out with tabs on to make a real model; hence the name of the software!
Many a colourful tissue box, just the twinkle of an idea on the
computer the night before, has been presented to Mum on Mothers day!
Development has continued and the current range of tabs educational software, called aspexTabs and aspexTabsMST, is still finding new users both at school
and at home. In the early days tabs enabled the user to draw 3D shapes
and print out their nets, but now, in aspexTabsMST you can now create a
whole variety of geometric shapes, colour them, put images on the faces,
view different projections in the 1st and 3rd angle and still print the
nets to make a real world model of your design. |
