Summary

A programmable toy electric vehicle created by Milton Bradley, UK in 1979, styled as a lunar-inspired utility vehicle. This original version is from UK and is white with the name 'bigtrak'. The US version named 'BIG TRAK' was grey. It is believed this was the first commerically available programmable toy sold in the world. The toy was based on an original toy made by Peter Ocko, the son of LEGO Robotics developer Steve Ocko from parts of a 'Simon' toy.

The battery-powered toy could be programmed using a 24-key keypad on top of the vehicle. It could be accompanied by a cargo trailer which when connected could be programmed to dump its load. See item HT 62395.

This object forms part of the Sunrise Collection which includes educational robots, software and multimedia recordings of teachers and students, mainly in Victoria, exploring new possibilities with computer programming.

This toy's existence demonstrates the ability of a child to abstract from one context to apply their understanding in another, what is commonly called 'transfer'. Peter Ocko, as a child, foresaw the benefit of using the programming capacity of a musical toy to control a toy truck. The truck moved according to the commands given through the keyboard but the feature was that this could be a multistep set of commands - a computer program. As very young children could play with this toy, they could experience programmed control, a facility to be further developed in later life. This could be identified as the learning of emerging computational thinking, both on the part of Peter Ocko and of the children who had the toy.


Video recording of advertisment 0 https://youtu.be/SgEkpcPC2I8?si=glPmSNsGZJvm-mAb

All programming to BigTrak was done through the keypad on top of the vehicle:

Forward/Backwards: Move forward or backwards in units of body length
Left/Right: Turn left or right in units of roughly 1/60th of a full rotation
P: Pause in 1/10 of second time units
Photon Symbol: Fire the light bulb "laser
CM: Clear Memory
CE: Clear Entry
x2: Repeat
TEST: Run short test program
TICK: Check last instruction
Out: Dump optional trailer accessory
GO: Start

Physical Description

A cream and dark-grey toy truck made of many moulded plastic parts assembled with metal screws, mounted on six black plastic wheels with a multi-coloured, operable touch keypad and a red on/off switch on its top and a blue perspex headlamp at the front. It has plastic stickers on each side and a sticker with grey, black, red, orange, yellow and white stripes along each side with one word of text in black. On its base it has moulded text.

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