In a nutshell, Spex is used by children to design rooms and other
places. They drag items of pre-made furniture into a room, arrange the
layout, colour scheme etc, and view it in the bird's eye view or in 3D;
budgets, graphs etc are also included in the software.
Buyers of Spex shouldn't expect to see an all singing all dancing
software program with flashing lights and shoot'em'up. One of the main
reasons 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 just know how to use it!
Spex is also very flexible with no predetermined outcomes which means
children use their imagination and initiative to make their own
decisions and produce their own individual result. 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, 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 the PC secured the continuity of
its use in schools which were in the process of rapidly expanding the
provision of IT in the classroom.
Spex thrived on the PC in schools, and once again, notwithstanding
the benefits and popularity of Spex, this must have been in part due to
the relatively few educational software titles being developed for the
PC generally. |
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.
But at this time Spex seems to be benefitting 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 the short learning curve to get to grips with the new software, and
parents and children buy the software because they love it, it's simple,
absorbing and so much fun!
|
