Teaching a nation to compute: The Rapira project and Soviet information-technology education

While many scientists, educators, technicians, and students in the Soviet Union agree that acquiring computers and teaching large numbers of Soviets to use them needs to be a top priority for the next two decades, the country lacks the computers, educational software, and expertise necessary to foster widespread familiarity with the capabilities and power of information technology. The Rapira project, an educational-programming computer system including a programming language and extensive tutorial materials, was designed by the Group for School Informatics at Novosibirsk State University as an effort to overcome the dearth of computing expertise in the Soviet Union. The group originally aimed to install Rapira in thousands of schools all over the Soviet Union; instead, it has remained a relatively small project with a limited base of users. This paper examines the context of the educational policy and the state of Soviet information technology in which the Group for School Informatics operated, relates the history and current status of the Rapira project, analyzes some of the reasons for its essential failure, and draws some conclusions from the experiences of the Group for School Informatics for Soviet computerization efforts in general.