It was 1995. Sunday nights were the worst. Pre-schooler Teri Tan would regularly complain of stomach cramps. Once it got so bad that her parents rushed her to hospital, suspecting appendicitis. The cause, however, was more mundane. Teri hated going to her neighbourhood kindergarten because she couldn’t communicate in Mandarin.

“Her teacher actually thought she was disobedient,” says Teri’s mother, Moira Cheah.

“She wasn’t a disobedient child, she just didn’t understand her teacher.”

Teri’s parents, both English teachers, bought available Mandarin CD-Roms to support the Mandarin lessons but it didn’t work. Teri found them too difficult to follow.

Her father, Patrick, an English teacher at Serangoon Junior College and former advertising man, had an interest in creating multi-media software. And with necessity being the mother of invention, it seemed natural to try to design a Mandarin CD-Rom programme that would appeal to English-speaking children.

More Ribbons programmes were developed. Today, the Tan’s company, A-Star Interactive, has a range of programmes – about 14 titles – for pre-school level to Primary Four. They work in tandem with Mandarin teachers and follow the primary school Chinese syllabus closely.

Patrick quit teaching and it was about a year before the first Ribbons Learns! CD-Rom was available for a market test. The adventures of a plucky female bear was well accepted in the consumer surveys, but marketing the product proved quite tough. In the mid-90s, there wasn’t much awareness of educational software. Parents were not convinced that children could learn the language by playing computer games. Still, the Tans knew they were on to a good thing.

Ribbons Learns! was made to enable a child with no knowledge of Chinese to learn the basics. The instructions are given in English and the games are designed to capture the interest of a reluctant Chinese pupil. The content was adapted from the Primary One textbook and injected with humour and suspense.

Best of all, Teri tried it out as it was being developed and it managed to spark her interest in learning the language. Today, she’s a Primary Three pupil who’s a confident Mandarin speaker. “Her Chinese marks are satisfactory,” says Moira. “Sometimes over 90%.”

In 1997, the Ribbons series of CD-Roms won the Economic Development Board and National Computer Board Innovative Development Award for local technical developments. Moira was persuaded to leave her job as an English teacher at St Nicholas Girl’s School to join her husband.

“The Ribbons programmes focus on the most difficult words in the textbooks but doesn’t mimic the textbooks page by page,” says Moira. “There is a good reason for this. If the CD-ROM is exactly the same as the school textbook, it’s like sending the child to school twice. Children may either become bored with the CD-Rom or worse, become inattentive in school.”

Patrick and Moira bring a wealth of teaching experience to the design process of A-Star’s products. Take their latest programme, Beyond The Stars which helps kids write better Chinese essays. For Primary Four pupils, this problem-solving game takes them into outer space where they battle dragons and find magic crystals. Apart from the fun element, they learn Chinese idioms and difficult expressions incidentally – matching the words correctly and gaining points to get to the next level of play.

Says Moira, “From our discussions with the heads of Chinese Studies in different schools, we found out that children develop coping strategies. They don’t do well in essay writing because they memorise some basic vocabulary and use these same terms again and again in their written work.

“Chinese teachers say that if children would learn the new and effective expressions found in their textbooks, and use the idioms as well, they can score better marks.”

In the pipeline are programmes for Primary Five and Six pupils. A-Star is awaiting details of the new syllabus for next year before embarking on the production.