Despite the passage of time, the terrible events of April 1912, when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, still fascinate both young and old alike.

Titanic, an extensive information technology resource pack from ESM, will bring the intriguing story right into the classroom. The pack offers a chance for children to research the liner's launching, her sinking in April 1912 and her discovery and exploration on the seabed by Robert Ballard 73 years later.

Many educational software packages attempt to reconstruct a specific historical incident. Two of the best known are The Mary Rose in which the Tudor warship is found in the Solent and excavated, and Expedition To Saqqara, where an expedition to one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt is mounted.

The Titanic pack has been designed as a set of four modules. The first of these provides the background for the rest of the material. There are three separate computer programs and a set of linked work cards.

The Story provides a factual account of the tragedy, in a series of teletext pages and high resolution graphics screens. The story can be paused, which allows time for discussion or for children to work at their own pace. The graphics are effective in setting the scene.

'Titanic: The Facts' and 'Teletext 1912' are both teletext simulations. Although television didn't exist in 1912, 'Teletext 1912' is a serious attempt to create a complete teletext channel for April 15, 1912. There are news stories of the day, as well as sports information, details of holidays and prices of the time.

'Titanic: The Facts' contains a host of interesting but well-known details about the Titanic - the number of millionaires on board, for example - and some that are not too well-known, such as details of the Princess of Death. It's a creative and imaginative use of teletext.

The second of the four modules, The Databases, is an outstanding collection of historical material. The disc provides a database manager and two files that allow you to check on all those people who sailed with the Titanic.

The database has been specially written and it is menu-driven, quick and easy to use. A typical complex search on eight fields takes less than a minute. The accompanying manuals have step-by-step sample searches and 20 illustrated work cards. Many teachers will value this tutorial style. 'The Passenger Database' contains over 1,300 records with eight fields. Each record includes a passenger's name, class, port of embarkation and whether or not they survived the tragedy. There is an additional comment field, which says whether the person was a millionaire or professional boxer, for example.

'The Crew Database' has over 900 records with details of name, sex, address, rating, pay and so on.

Package author, John Doherty, has spent a considerable time collecting and verifying all the information that makes up these unique datafiles. Both the passenger and crew records were collected from a variety of soources - the Titanic's passenger and crew lists held at the Public Record Office at Kew in London, books, newspaper clippings, and magazines.

Without a doubt he's produced a first-rate information source and, in the process, shown that many of the official records contain a number of inaccuracies.

The database module is a superb educational resource. Children quickly begin to develop empathy with the people listed. This was especially the case when tragic stories of separated families - that they had read about in other modules - were made 'real' by the children's own deductions from the records. There is no doubt that this particular module will give children understanding of the disaster and the social and material conditions of people on board the ship. Harder information-handling skills are thoroughly developed by using this module. There's access to real data for discussion and hypothesis testing, and it provides for all sorts of related follow-ups: graph making, creative writing, poetry, art and craft, for example.

The third module, Titanic Simulations, is made up of two programs based on the rediscovery of the ship. 'The Search' simulates the discovery of the wreck in September 1985 by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In the simulation, children navigate a ship called The Knorr around a specific area of the Atlantic, videotaping the sea bed with an underwater camera.

A red X marks the last reported position of the Titanic. This is not where the wreck is to be found. Due to a navigational error, the ship's radio officer gave the ship's position wrongly - it has failed further west than reported. This is one of the reasons that the wreck remained undiscovered for so long.

As the ship broke its back when it sank, bow and stern lie separately. It's great to watch the expression of children when the screen at last shows pictures of either the bow or stern sections of the wreck. Children who used the package with me were probably just as excited as Robert Ballard was on September 1, 1985.

'The Exploration' simulates dives to the bow and stern sections of the ship in 1985 and 1986. Alvin, a mini-submarine, has to be navigated around either of the two sections of the Titanic.

You have to keep an eye on the oxygen supplies too, as Alvin's air can run out. If you ignore the low air warning, a message appears telling you that you will have to spend the next day recovering - you miss a day's dive.

The computer keeps a record of each group's progress in locating the 20 different objects at each site. When children find an object, a full description and drawing of the find can be obtained from the Resources Pack.

Like the previous three modules, the simulations are supplemented by illustrated workcards which cover different aspects of the expeditions. They are of the highest quality, enabling teachers to set children tasks linked with the simulation. There are some outstanding ideas offered that really fire children's imaginations and set them off on some exciting tracks.

When using these, I soon found a corner of the classroom set up as a radio studio, with one girl interviewing another child playing Robert Ballard after he had found the Titanic. It really sounded like the Today programme!

The simuations and the follow-up work enable a tremendous amount of cross-curricular study. But what I was especially pleased with was the standard of the creative writing that it fostered.

Many teachers will find the time limits built into the search and exploration phases easier to use than other open-ended simulations programs. It does ensure an equal share out of computer time, and forces groups to work away from the computer too.

The final module is Titanic Reference Materials but it doesn't have computer content at all. There is a well-produced set of 40 A4 reference cards. The range is amazing - menus from the dining rooms, a full set of newspaper reports covering the sinking, details of the lifeboats and of the Titanic's captain, reprintings of various telegrams and extracts from the court of inquiry's findings.

In addition, a collection of memorabilia is provided. There is a set of amazing postcards - reprints from the originals. These include action pictures of other White Star liners, the launch of the Titanic, pictures of the ship's interiors and a number of memorable postcards. The most moving piece of material is a reprint of a contemporary account of the terrible tragedy entitled The Deathless Story Of The Titanic by Philip Gibbs, written in the emotional prose of the time. Another useful resource is Michael McAughan's 32-page pamphlet called Titanic, which was published by the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in 1982.

Titanic is one of the most extensive educational computing packages yet produced. Despite its size and tremendous scope, it remains easy to manage. It is a pack with a range of different types of software - simulation, database, teletext material - and there is sufficient material and work for a whole class. The hundreds of activity and workcards help bring structure to the children's studies. Above all, Titanic gives children the opportunity to work with real historical evidence. It provides a very rich source of cross-curricular work in reading, writing, history, geography and mathematics.

Titanic joins the very best historical packages like Tressel's Wagons West and Into The Unknown, Fernleaf's Vikings and Normans, and Cambridge University's 1914. These all demonstrate the real potential that the micro has for the teaching of history. But this package seems to have even more depth and quality.