Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University and a famous American science fiction writer. There are a lot of works which have come from under his pen: I, Robot, The Gods Themselves, Foundation's Edge and so on. He was one of the most prolific writers, having written or edited more than five hundred books. Amongst the stars there is even an asteroid named after him.

The Fun They Had is one of the short stories written by Isaac Asimov. In this story the author touches the problem of technology influence on the teaching process, showing us a future we will never see - the story takes place in 2157. A boy and a girl find an old book about school. They discuss what they have read in there and compare these things from the past with those they have now. At the end, it is time for them to go to their mechanical teachers, but they still want to learn more about the school of old times, because they like it.

The text is written in a lyrical manner. The story is a third person narration. The narration is interwinding with dialogues, so the text seems lively. After reading this story one may feel all smiley, sunny and a little nostalgic and sad. The text can cause a wide range of emotions, and mostly it is because of brilliant Asimov's style of writing.

The text can be logically divided into four parts: finding a book, Margie's retrospection, animated discussion, and going back, down to earth.

The first part is introduction. Here we can see that Tommy shows Margie a book he has found in the attic of his house, and they examine it. The author uses some epithets to describe the book here ("yellow and crinkly" pages). The children are not really happy with the form of the book ("what a waste"), they are used to electronic ones. They begin to read the book and realize that it is about school.

Here we come to the second part. This is a retrospection to an episode of Margie's life. In this part we can read Margie's inner thoughts. Also we learn something about the construction of mechanical teachers. In this case author uses epithets, too, and with the help of them we learn that Margie does not like her mechanical teacher that much ("large and black and ugly"). We can see that the "most hated" part of studying for Margie was writing homework out in a punch code for the mechanical teacher. So, it is clear that this "new" system of education is boring for children and cannot be compared with the old one on this point.

The third part is circling around the discussion of differences between present time schools and old ones. The children argue whether a real teacher can know as much as mechanical one does or not. This part consists mostly of dialogues with rare insertions of the author's speech with the help of which he describes characters' manner of speaking and acting ("looked ... with very superior eyes", "screamed with laughter").

The forth part makes the characters and us go down to earth again. The children need to go to their mechanical teachers. The magic and the mystery of the old book is gone. But, sitting in the schoolroom, Margie fantasizes about regular schools and teachers, about laughing, mutual help and support.

There are some stylistic devices, which are used quite often in the story. First of all, they are epithets. Secondly, it is necessary to mention that the author uses an italic font to point out some words: "his grandfather", "centuries ago". Colloquial words are also of frequent use ("gee", "I betcha", "I guess", "stupid"). They make the story more true to life. Besides, the author makes up a new word - "telebook" - to name an invention of the future.

This story makes the reader think about the teaching process of nowadays. Having read the text, one may ask oneself, "What is better for us? Regular teachers or mechanical ones? And why?" Of course, everybody should find an answer by himself or herself. Personally, I suppose that a regular teacher is much better, although we live in the era of informational technologies. In the story we can observe that Margie is bored, she is in need of real interaction between people. She is only a child, and it is not a soulless machine that can give her motivation and help her to become a great person in the future.