Software scientist 

In the early ’80s, the lightning bolt struck then middle-school teacher Peggy Healy Stearns, PhD, ’87.

“The school had no computers at the time,” she remembers. “One day a colleague of mine brought in a computer, and, as soon as I touched it, I knew I wanted to design educational software.”

Stearns is nothing if not determined. Married with two children and holding down her full-time job, she found UB’s Elementary Education Program and began commuting 100 miles roundtrip to attend classes. Her natural affinity for her area of interest must have been obvious, because Professor Alan Riedesel quickly recruited her for the doctoral program. He also got Stearns an assistantship on the Software Evaluation Project.

“My job was to review all the educational software we could get our hands on. In the process, I learned what worked and what didn’t,” says Stearns. She also began to establish connections with the key software publishers like educational giant Scholastic.

Designer days

Stearns’ remaining years of study were similarly rich. She began presenting at conferences, encouraged by Professor David Farr. She taught courses. Was an associate in Farr’s software development lab. Designed software. Finished her dissertation, a comparison of teacher-student evaluations of educational software, in record time.

“I was allowed to study what I needed to know, to focus my curriculum and energies on where I wanted to go,” Stearns says. “A PhD gives credibility, yes, but my experience in the software evaluation project taught me what was out there and allowed me to get to know publishers.”

Post-UB, Stearns immediately took a position as technology coordinator for a school district. She also designed and taught a course for UB (still offered today) and started writing for professional publications. In 1989, she left the school district to concentrate her attentions on educational software. She began consulting for Scholastic, Apple Computer and other companies, and presenting at seminars around the country.

When the sales of the software she’d designed became substantial, Stearns happily began to focus exclusively on actual software design. “I do all the research, which takes a long time,” she says. She conducts focus groups with teachers to find out what they need, develops a concept and design, and then contracts with a software publisher to produce the title.

Teaching kids to write

Today, Stearns has eight software programs to her credit. Collectively, they’ve won more than three dozen national awards. Perhaps her most popular program is Graph Club, released in 1993 for students from kindergarten to grade 5, and still sold today. Stearns’ idea for how the program should work hit her as she sat on the chairlift at a ski resort. “Graph Club lets children manipulate graphs on the screen the way they would concrete objects, which helps them grasp the concept,” she explains. “It revolutionized graphing in elementary school.”

Stearns’s newest creation is Stationery Studio. “One of teachers’ biggest challenges is teaching kids to be effective writers,” she says. “For kids to write well, they have to write often. So I researched what motivates kids to write. One solution is cool stationery.” Voila – Stationery Studio includes 226 stationery borders and shapes that children can customize with age-appropriate line styles, line widths, and layouts for handwritten projects. The program also includes an easy-to-use word processor, and Peter H. Reynolds, an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books, produced all the artwork for the program. Stearns is already developing a Stationery Studio spin-off with more borders and lessons. Fittingly, she hears often from educators who tell her that her software has made a difference in their classrooms.

Today, Stearns is embarking on a new path. All her software writing seems to have birthed a desire to write children’s fiction. She has taken courses and fiction writing, and recently sent out her first two stories for publication.

Ultimately, Stearns says, her goal is to make educational software simple, easy, and clear. She also intends her programs for use in subjects across the curriculum. “Learning should be holistic,” she says, “with the subject integrated in a meaningful way. If projects are motivating, kids learn even when they don’t know they’re learning.”

Written by Grace Lazzara