“By focusing on third-graders,” Schlukbier said, “I’ve got ten years to learn from them what information they really need and want.”[4.13] What they hoped for, in many ways, didn’t seem like a newspaper at all. Rather they wanted their own tools. The bulletin board blossomed with imaginary worlds in which, for example, Frank Daniels was the owner of a fictitious newsstand. Children could wend their ways through cyberspace by using written descriptions and computer commands to tell where they were and what they were doing. George Schlukbier’s young son, Shane, designed a mythical camp online with danger-ridden woods. Some may have wondered how this applied to _newspapers_; I myself did. And then it dawned: if newspapers would be increasingly two-way in the future, just like the Net, then didn’t it make sense to see how the children interacted with each other, as they did in role-playing games? The children could change as they grew older, or moved away from the area when their parents packed up for another job with IBM, but the journalists could still observe the basic patterns. The _N & O_ put more than 6,000 children and 700 teachers online for free. NandOLand was the name of the educational service designed with children in mind; a mouse click on a cloud, for example, would take children to a NASA area on the Net. The students could send electronic mail to each other or type to each other instantly. “I have seen children who never cared what they wrote turn to a dictionary rather than send a letter to a key pal with misspelled words,” said a teacher named Stephanie Toney. “I have seen a child with a severe reading disability sit for hours and concentrate on e-mail to another person on the other side of the world. His English teacher would have given her right arm to interest him in reading and writing for this period of time.” Granted, NandOLand wasn’t the entire solution to the needs of children. Many couldn’t spend much time on a machine at school and lacked one at home. But the program was much better than the alternative: expensive school connections to the Net or no Internet at all.