Last year we were nominated as Member of the Month at the Educational Software Cooperative. Here is what we said about ourselves:

TAC-Software Wow ... Rosemary (the Webmaster) and the ESC really caught us by surprise ... the news about the Member of the Month nomination came just after we had released a major update to celebrate the second anniversary of our program Teaching Templates. We were preparing for the usual wrestling match with the first support questions, and secretly planning to emigrate to somewhere where there are no computers and where stamp collecting is regarded as a respectable way to earn a living.

Our program Teaching Templates is a mini-authoring suite of nine templates to produce tests and quizzes for the inter- or intranet. It's aimed at teachers or parents who want to catch up with screen-happy children, or at coaches in the corporate training market who require a motivating and entertaining e-learning platform. Our guiding principle has always been 'Keep it Simple'. You can easily check out whether we have succeeded or not by downloading an evaluation version from our web site.

The homebase of Tac-Software and the Teaching Templates development is Reutlingen University which is located in the south of Germany, a beautiful area with the Black Forest, Heidelberg, the Lake of Constance, Munich and the Alps all within easy reach. John, Robin, Gabi, Rainer and two cats are the core of the team. Does anybody know why so many software developers seem to like cats? John and Robin do the programming, Gabi looks after them and Rainer (Mr. Good News ... Bad News) is our chief beta tester and debugger. We love him really but ...

Our first educational software publication was a remarkably stable and compact DOS program called 'The Grammar and Vocabulary of Business English'. It was published way back in 1991 by Cornelsen/Oxford University Press and was still being sold last year! We will be more than happy if Teaching Templates achieves a similar life-cycle ... if not there's always the stamp collecting option.

Screenshots of the team are not yet available (too frightening!) but you can contact us at any time ... via the support email address or by snailmail and fax at:

PS At the time of the nomination WebWrap and the Multiple Choice Quiz Maker had not been released.