What would Robert Burns have made of an interactive computer version of his most accomplished poem, Tam o’ Shanter? Tradition appealed to him but authority did not, so the idea that his text is too precious to be played with by children would probably not have occurred to him.

Burns might not always have been too happy. At the launch of Learning and Teaching Scotland’s latest CD-Rom, pupils from Alloway Primary school demonstrate its versatility by bringing Tam’s wife Kate to the foreground and making her enormous. Judging by the gasps, some of the audience were not keen on the huge vision of the “sulky, sullen dame, gathering her brows like gathering storm, nursing her wrath”.

However, when the rigours of Burns’s hard life did not get the better of him, he was a playful character with a powerful imagination. So it is not difficult to see him sitting around a computer with children, building up scenes from the poem, posing characters, putting words in their mouths, adding the soundtrack - “Loud, deep and lang the thunder bellow’d” - and then, like a film director, playing the scenes back and tweaking them until he and the youngsters are happy with what they have created.

It would doubtless have seemed like a lot of fun to Burns, as it did to Alloway’s P6s and P7s. “They asked us because we’ve been to all the places in the poem: the auld, haunted kirk, the graveyard, the bridge over the Doon that Tam escapes across,” says one.

“They gave us 10 days to work on the computers and prepare the presentation. It was great.”

Most schoolchildren would share that reaction to the Tam o’ Shanter package, believes Joyce Abernethy, headteacher at Balfron Primary school. “They’d love to use this package for the work we and other schools get them to do on Burns at this time of year.

“It’s true that Tam o’ Shanter is quite challenging for young ones, but there’s a lot in it that appeals to them. The ones with a flair for language will appreciate the poetry and the others will enjoy the experience and can pick it up again when they’re more mature.”

Tam o’ Shanter, which will be distributed free to every primary and secondary school in Scotland thanks to National Grid for Learning funding, represents the first foray into Scottish education for LT Scotland’s partner on this project, Immersive Education, a company that grew from a collaboration between Oxford University and the Intel corporation. Their aim was to couple the latest research on learning and computer graphics in a platform that fires children’s imagination and gets them enjoyably involved. The result, known as Kar2ouche, has been used to create packages on Shakespeare’s plays that have been well received by teachers south of the border.

LT Scotland’s chief executive, Mike Baughan, regards partnership with commercial software firms as a productive way of improving the quality of resources available to Scottish schools. “As a national body we are not in competition with these companies. So when they come to us with an idea for a product we can point them in the right direction and tell them where teachers are saying they need better resources.”

In this case, though, the initiative came from LT Scotland. The collaboration with Immersive Education is unlikely to end now. A variety of ideas are circulating; one is to write teacher’s guides for the four Shakespeare plays in the Kar2ouche format - Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream - based on the 5-14 curriculum. (The existing guides are aimed at the national curriculum.) Lillian Johnston was seconded from her teaching post at St Ninian’s Primary school in Prestwick to write the guides for Tam o’ Shanter, which of course are for the 5-14 curriculum, in particular for levels C to E in information and communications technology and English language.

The guide gives an overview of the poem before focusing on different scenes, then pulling it all together at the end. The lessons and activities would take teachers about a term. Pupils are asked to explore how the characters react and what they might be thinking, rather than just what happens. They even look at the feelings of Tam’s horse.

As a poet who empathised with animals, Burns would undoubtedly have approved, though this is not what he had in mind when he wrote the final line: “Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare”.