Questron: The Fun Way to Bring Learning to Life

Here’s some Infor­ma­tion Age math for you:

The inter­net + the human mind’s amaz­ing pow­ers of recall = your child­hood rediscovered.

For the longest time I’ve been search­ing for a lost relic from my own child­hood, an edu­ca­tional toy I just recently learned was called Que­stron . (No, not the 1980s  role-playing game of the same name.) Does any­one remem­ber it? For some rea­son, I kept incor­rectly remem­ber­ing the name as “Quiztron” and thus my Google searches never turned up any­thing rel­e­vant and lead­ing me to believe I had pos­si­bly dreamed the thing into exis­tence. And then last week I stum­bled upon this old blog post by Copy­wrong and my san­ity was restored!

Que­stron was a battery-powered “answer wand” that worked with a series of specially-printed edu­ca­tional activ­ity books. The books were full of ques­tions that had mul­ti­ple choice answers, which you’d use the wand to select. If you touched the wand to a cor­rect answer, it lit up green and rewarded you with a happy-sounding alarm. If you touched a wrong answer, the wand lit up red and buzzed annoyingly.

It was all very high-tech for the mid-eighties, or at least it felt that way at the time; kind of like video games meets home­work. I think my mom brought this home think­ing it would deter me from play­ing so much Nin­tendo, the silly woman. I don’t remem­ber if Que­stron actu­ally taught me any­thing I didn’t already know, but it sure was fun to move that wand around on the col­or­ful pages and pre­tend I was smart. Of course, once you knew which block to touch for the cor­rect answer, it was easy impress mom and dad with your amaz­ing knowledge.

Today I dug a lit­tle fur­ther and unearthed this old Que­stron com­mer­cial (in sur­pris­ingly great qual­ity) that some­one uploaded ear­lier this year. I don’t remem­ber ever hav­ing seen this on TV, but the British accents prob­a­bly have some­thing to do with that. Now that I’m think­ing about it, I can’t recall ever hav­ing seen any com­mer­cial for Questron.

I’ve seen a cou­ple of wands and book sets going on Ebay for around $50. I don’t think I could bring myself to pay that much, but if I ever come across one of these things a yard sale or flea mar­ket, I’ll be all over it.

What about you? Do you remem­ber this toy, and if so, what books did you have?

More stuff and things!