Lightspan sent kids home with a PlayStation. Its K-8 curriculum came on game discs, and school districts bought consoles so students could practice reading and math in the living room. The idea was to connect school to home through the one machine kids already wanted to use. By early 2000 more than 873 school districts in 46 states had bought it. Lightspan was also building websites for teachers and parents, and the dot-com market was paying for that.

Game Consoles for Class

John Kernan and Carl Zeiger founded Lightspan in 1993, and both had started education technology companies before. For three years the company mostly built its product, Lightspan Achieve Now. It covered language arts, reading and math. Lightspan sold it only to schools and districts, which used it in class and sent it home. The prospectus warned that the business depended on Sony and on a steady supply of PlayStation consoles.

Twelve Dollars and a Merger

Lightspan priced 7.5 million shares at $12 in February 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as LSPN. Cable company Cox and computer maker Gateway bought shares alongside the offering. The dot-com crash soon followed, and the company kept losing money. In September 2003 PLATO Learning, a Minneapolis maker of school software, agreed to merge with Lightspan. The deal closed that November, and Lightspan's stock stopped trading.

Cover: The Light, from the third album of L'Estampe originale, Alexandre Lunois. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a lamp lit for study (the light of learning).