Joseph (Joe) Koenig (born August 14, 1930) is a Canadian filmmaker and entrepreneur who was the founder and president of Electronics Workbench. Biography Koenig was born in Dresden, Germany; his family fled Nazi Germany in 1937, emigrating to Canada and settling on a farm along the Grand River, outside what is now known as Cambridge, Ontario. National Film Board of Canada Koenig began his career as a filmmaker in 1956 at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He directed and/or produced 52 films, including Cosmic Zoom, Christopher's Movie Matinée and The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes. Among his numerous honours, he won two BAFTA awards, for Energy and Matter (1966) and The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes (1968). International Cinemedia Center Productions He left the NFB in 1971 and, with colleagues John Kemeny, George Kaczender and Don Duprey, formed International Cinemedia Center Productions, where he produced educational films and animated content for clients in Canada and the United States, including the celebrated educator Caleb Gattegno. Interactive Image Technologies In 1978, International Cinemedia became Alliance Communications (which would become Alliance Atlantis). Koenig left the firm, moved from Montreal to Toronto in and founded Interactive Image Technologies. At the NFB, he had become keenly interested in using multimedia as an educational tool, and focused on producing and distributed educational animated and interactive content and videos. In 1992, the Ontario Government modified its high school curriculum to require the teaching of electronics. A call for proposals to provide a simulation software package to meet the required learning outcomes was issued, and Koenig’s company was awarded the contract. In 1995, Koenig became embroiled in a copyright lawsuit that gained international attention. He sued the operator of a website that distributed illegal copies of his software through a bulletin-board and was successful in his lawsuit, which was filed in the UK. One of the main challenges faced by early versions of Electronics Workbench, was the reluctance of educators to use simulation software as part of their electronics curriculum. In the early 1990s, there was considerable opposition among the electronics education community regarding the use of simulation software for the delivery of electronics curriculum. Many educators felt that a "hands on" methodology was the only valid method of learning electronics, and that simulation was a less-effective substitute. In 1996, Koenig approached best-selling author Dr. Colin Simpson, with the idea of integrating