Lots of great suggestions in this thread. Thank you for posting the inquiry. The one thing I haven't seen addressed (except indirectly) is how to strike an appropriate balance between the rationality and open inquiry of science, and spirituality. I firmly believe this is not an either/or tradeoff. You might consider referring her to Feynman, or Sagan, or a book I used long ago in college called "The Way of the Scientist" (don't know the author/editor) that has interviews with well known scientists. In our anti-scientific time, the commitment to evidence-based inquiry as the way of finding truth about the physical universe needs to be encouraged. I was lucky enough to have a father who lived into his mid-80's. To the end, there was nothing that delighted him more than finding a new way of thinking about how the world (and people!) worked -- as long as the new framework did a better, more complete job of explanation and prediction than what his previous understanding, no matter how firmly held it was. But we still need spirituality to assign meaning to what we figure out, and I readily admit that there are important dimensions of life that we do not (yet?) know how to address with scientific habits of mind.

As noted above, the PLATO courseware created by Control Data is still available, in significantly updated form, from Edmentum, inc. They've also built some new curricula from scratch. It's browser-based now. The original PLATO courseware created on the University of Illinois system was selectively marketed as NOVANet by Pearson. Other parts of the PLATO system live on in other implementations of LMS, e-mail, threaded chat, multiplayer games, simulations, and so on. And I would give credit to the PLATO project for many engineering innovations. They created their own extensions to the CDC mainframe operating system or real time transaction processing, in order to support all those online video terminals. They wrote their own modem program, before Bell 103. The orange-dot (plasma) display was a solution to the problem of prohibitively expensive video memory. They had a global network of thousands of terminals linked through PLATO mainframes, years before ARPANet. Much of the basic research on computer-based learning and instruction was done on PLATO, and on a smaller system called TICCIT, funded by the Navy. Incidentally, NSF was the main source of funding for PLATO -- not the Department of Education.

PLATO is alive and well and living inside Edmentum, Inc. They still have rights to the trademark. To clarify: The original PLATO system went in three major directions: 1) University of Illinois retained ownership of everything written on the system. The courseware was eventually licensed to Pearson as NOVANet. 2) Control Data licensed the operating system and developed its own PLATO content, as well as a test administration technology and other product lines such as aviation training. Most of these lines of business were eventually sold to entrepreneurs, and the courseware is now part of the offering of Edmentum. It includes extensive curricula in math, reading, and other subjects, especially for middle school/remedial through grade 12. There are dozens of studies of effective applications available, in a wide range of mainstream and alternative school, adult/job training, and other contexts. 3) Before ARPANet, early LMS, e-mail, threaded chat, and multiplayer games and simulations were pioneered on the global network of PLATO mainframes, and the developers of those systems went on to play key roles in the founding of the game industry and others. A great deal of the basic research on computer-based teaching and learning was done on the PLATO system from the 1970's through the 1990's.