You don’t need megabytes and microchips to work London Emblem’s Badgemaker, just a bit of muscle and a modicum of imagination. First, you get your artwork. You can buy it in, or draw it on paper - or use a computer art package, if you must. Place the masterpiece, together with a blank badge under the Badgemaker press, pull a handle - it’s a bit like drawing an old-fashioned pint - and, hey presto, you’ve got yourself a customised product as good as anything you could buy in the shops.

It could prove a nice little earner for the school, especially if the machine is easy enough for pupils to use. Visitors to BETT know that it is, because London Emblem has a clever marketing ploy. Instead of having adults to demonstrate its product, it employs pupils from Bishop Perowne School in Worcester. There was no need to listen to any hard-sell, spiel or superlatives: all teachers had to do was watch the kids in action.

In contrast, virtually all the other stands in the main area of Olympia were staffed exclusively by adults. It’s decidedly odd: a show dedicated to products aimed specifically at children, and nowhere to be heard the pitter-patter of little feet or clump-clump of Doc Martens.

I saw some marvellous primary school programs, including a mesmerising one in which individual letters of the alphabet mysteriously morphed into a picture. “C” is for caterpillar, so “C” becomes one before your very eyes. It would have been wonderful to observe an infant using it. A thirty-something with a Next suit and probably a degree in computing science, however charming, is no substitute.

Fortunately, there were some children at BETT ‘95. Restricted to a remote corner of Olympia, well away from the main exhibition area, pupils from half a dozen schools simply got on with lessons as best they could and let visitors draw their own conclusions about the efficacy of the IT resources they were using.

I watched, for instance, top juniors from St John’s Primary, London, use Apple’s new CD-Rom, Renewables in View, to research alternative energy sources, and then - as if it were the most natural thing in the world - present their findings in clever little multimedia “essays”.

Equally impressive were pupils from the Lord Grey School, Bletchley, who were showing off the Acorn PocketBook II. They used them to log the responses to a detailed market survey they were conducting on the sort of people who come to BETT, and then using the on-board software to publish their interim results in the form of bar charts, graphs and suchlike. It wasn’t so much the technology that was impressive, but the casual aplomb with which the children used the machines.

But I suppose Louise Wells, one of the pupils I spoke to, is luckier than most. She and all the other Year 8 pupils at the school are issued with a Pocketbook which they can use throughout the year in all their lessons and at home. I asked her if she could wordprocess. Use control technology? Do spreadsheets? Databases? She nodded in response to each question, puzzled that I could even entertain the thought that someone of her age might not be able to.

Because they are so cheap, these clever little palmtops offer schools one of the few realistic strategies for allowing large numbers of pupils to spend extended periods at IT.

The basic PocketBook costs from Pounds 169.95. I wonder how many home-made badges you’d have to sell to equip a whole school?