A husband-and-wife team in Calgary turned the classroom chalkboard into a giant touch screen. David Martin and Nancy Knowlton built the SMART Board, an interactive whiteboard that let a teacher tap, write and drag on a projected computer screen. By 2010 the boards hung in classrooms around the world, paid for mostly by schools and governments. When SMART went public that July, Intel and the buyout firm Apax Partners sat beside the founders as its biggest owners.

Chalk Meets the Computer

Martin and Knowlton started SMART in 1987. The SMART Board made a computer feel like a wall a whole class could share. A teacher could circle a word, open a map or save the day's notes with a touch. SMART sold its boards through dealers, then added software, student response systems and flat-panel displays. Its prospectus warned that a cut in government funding for schools could hurt sales.

Tablets Change the Lesson

SMART priced its IPO at $17 a share in July 2010 and listed on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. The timing was hard. School budgets tightened, and tablets gave teachers a cheaper screen to share. The stock spent most of its public life below the offer price. In 2016 SMART agreed to be bought by Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics maker, through a Singapore subsidiary. Its shares left Nasdaq in September 2016.

Cover: The First Lesson, George Baxter. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a first lesson (the classroom).