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Three kids get sucked into Cyberspace to defend Motherboard from the scheming Hacker — voiced with maximum ham by Christopher Lloyd — and the only weapon that ever works is math. PBS somehow made estimating and pattern-finding feel like saving the world.
MECC's math game from the school computer lab: steer a green Muncher around a grid, eat every number that fits the rule, and stay away from the Troggles. It came out on the Apple II in 1986 and was still in computer labs through the '90s.
PBS's answer to math phobia: a half hour of sketches, parody game shows and music videos about percentages, capped every day by Mathnet, the Dragnet spoof whose detectives carried calculators instead of guns. Five seasons, 230 episodes, and a generation of adults who forgot every formula but can still sing the theme.