ABSTRACT
Math Blaster! is a video game released in 1983 for the Apple II computer, intended to engage and entertain elementary school students. This game highlights the trajectory through which American society came to greatly value science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. Occupying a newfound role as a hybrid of gaming and learning, Math Blaster! served as a powerful media instrument to transfer cultural ideals about STEM and computer technology to elementary classrooms. In this chapter, I examine Math Blaster!’s role in elementary school education to understand how similar technologies served as a touchpoint for the development of an education reform in the 1980s. With the introduction of Math Blaster! as a learning tool in elementary school classrooms, teachers started to perform a new hybrid role, positioned as both classroom managers and edutainment technology advocates for computers. I utilize Foucault’s media genealogical method, which looks at history’s nonlinear elements to illustrate how institutions steered the direction of media technologies. I investigate the cultural prescriptions that Math Blaster! helped create and reinforce, highlighting the hybrid role of edutainment that this game fulfilled alongside the newfound hybrid role that teachers occupied as both learners and advocates for this new technology. I ultimately argue that Math Blaster! served as an instrument for instilling the values of a STEM education in the elementary school classroom in the context of the Reagan-era Cold War developments, but importantly, it also had significant power in shaping a genre of gaming that relies on entertainment to impart these values even today.
