This paper reviews briefly the essential characteristics of both invitational education and computer assisted instruction (CAI) and the ways in which coordination of these two models can produce stimulating and valuable educational experiences for students. A matrix illustrates the characteristics of CAI which can support the major values of invitational education, and a series of guidelines based on invitational theory are presented for designing educational software so as to maximize humanistic use of this medium. For example, it is suggested that programers design frames to communicate one message at a time and invite student decisions as to when to proceed to the next frame; provide brief, clear user messages which do not attempt to simulate human emotions; offer real not empty user choices; preassess student entry skills and attitudes and design systems to tailor presentations to each individual learner; invite students to map their own strategies; encourage learners to ask the computer for more information than that required to pass the tests; provide a choice of incentives and rewards to meet varying student needs for praise and direction; invite easy and direct user input with devices such as a touch screen, joystick, mouse, or light pen; invite students to create their own questions, illustrations, graphics, explanations, and tests; provide clear glossaries and generic help systems; invite open dialog between users and systems; and avoid the text-question-answer pattern that negates so many efforts in both machine and human mediated learning. A 20-item bibliography is provided. (ESR)