The Atterbury Foundation was founded in 1994 by Charlie Atterbury as a private, fully IRS qualified 501(c)(3) not-for-profit foundation. The goal of the Atterbury Foundation is to encourage and support the development of various creative and imaginative educational materials, for grades Kindergarten through 16. The sole content and purpose of these products are to promote responsible and ethical computer use while creating an awareness of computer security.

This effort is made by the Atterbury Foundation with a sincere hope that today's children will grow up to become the ethical and responsible computer users of tomorrow.

Atterbury Foundation Projects

The Atterbury Foundation's first project was a K-3 effort called "Chip & Friends", based upon an original concept by Gale Warshawsky of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The goal of introducing responsible and ethical computer usage to first time computer users was the primary purpose of this first effort. The Atterbury Foundation worked for nearly two years with teachers from Maine to Hawaii, rewriting and refining Gale's original "outreach program" into a structured set of high quality educational materials. These have proven to be effective teaching tools within the elementary academic community.

Future Atterbury Foundation projects include an interactive video game which features Chip and his friends. This will provide a learning experience for children while allowing them to actually interact with a computer.

The Computer Learning Foundation

The Atterbury Foundation is a principle sponsor of the Computer Learning Foundation of Palo Alto, CA. The CLF is a non-profit organization whose goals are to educate children in the responsible use of today's technologies. The CLF has designated October as Computer Learning Month. Each year it conducts several nationwide contests for students, educators, schools and community groups.

In 1996, the Atterbury Foundation sponsored a poster competition as one contest. Poster entries were divided into two grade groups, K-6 and 7-12. All posters submitted had to communicate the importance of using proper "Nettiquette" for the Internet by encouraging the practice of good, ethical and responsible behavior. Home PC Magazine very graciously provided two pages in both their October and November issues to promote this contest. They published some of the winning entries in a follow-up article. Nearly 500 entries were received from schools all over the United States.