I taught Basic to students on a government funded scheme. The idea was they would get a job in some goevrnment department and their introduction to computers would get them an interview. It worked in most cases. They were keyboard proficient. We developed programs to test how fast someone could type the alphabet. But some students were more curious and wanted to know about machine code for games. Luckily I had been taught Assembly language on an IBM mainframe so the concept of learning some machine code was fairly straight foward. Except we had to program machine code by 'poking' it. One student got the hang of it and developed a card game - solitaire. We pioneered a lot techniques such as programming a robot arm. We even programmed eeproms.

You have to remember many of the students were school rejects. They had failed at basic mathematics in school.

It was like having a research lab with unqualified students. We did what we wanted. The point was we had virtually zero absence. Students were keen to know what next...