In 1971, three student teachers at Carleton College in Minnesota created a computer game to teach their students about the westward expansion. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger programmed the game in BASIC language on an HP 2100 minicomputer with only 32 kilobytes of memory. The game was designed to simulate the experience of a family traveling from Missouri to Oregon in 1848 and teach students about the challenges faced by pioneers on the Oregon Trail. The game became popular in classrooms across the United States and eventually was published by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) in 1985. Over the years, "The Oregon Trail" has undergone numerous updates and re-releases for various platforms. The original version of the game was text-based, and players had to use the arrow keys to navigate their wagon.

Fifty years ago this winter, a young student teacher by the name of Don Rawitsch introduced his eighth grade American history class to a computer game on westward expansion that he had developed along with his colleagues Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger. The game, called The Oregon Trail, would go on to sell over 65 million copies, many of them to educational institutions, making it one of the bestselling games of all time, right up there with Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. But when I talked to Rawitsch recently, he said that when he first came up with the idea, making money was the furthest thing from his mind. "Back in 1971, there was a lot of activity going on in the world of schools to upgrade curriculum and come up with innovative methods of teaching," Rawitsch said. Inspired by his teachers at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Rawitsch decided to pursue new types of pedagogy for his student teacher classes at Jordan Junior High School in Minneapolis.

Pong was, however, the game that kickstarted the video arcade and home console industries, the profitability of its hardware and the simplicity of the gameplay – just two bats, a ball and a scoring system – ensuring its huge success and iconic afterlife. Devised by development engineer George J Klose as a means of repurposing calculator chips, it was a big success, leading to Mattel's legendary American football and soccer titles, and no doubt piquing the interest of a certain Nintendo engineer … It's a formative space shooter, with the player battling two computer controlled UFOs amid a rudimentary star-scape, but it's that curvaceous fibre glass cabinet (which earned the game a cameo in the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green) that we'll always remember. Players aim and fire at passing battleships, targeting them via a rotating periscope fixed to the front of the cab. Its success inspired the nascent arcade industry to experiment with elaborate novelty interfaces, a factor that proved vital in maintaining the success of the coin-op industry as home consoles proliferated. Western Gun (1975, Taito) Alongside Tank, Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in the US) helped lay the foundations of the multidirectional shooter genre, allowing two players to navigate a cactus-strewn landscape, blasting six-guns at each other until one cowboy fell.

A new version of Oregon Trail for Apple Arcade features improved Native American representation, and new playable Native characters and storylines. A new version of Oregon Trail for Apple Arcade features improved Native American representation, and new playable Native characters and storylines. Jazz Halfmoon, 38, remembers playing the educational video game Oregon Trail as a reward for doing well in class. "It was on a super old computer," she says. "The green screen was like the only color."

A new video game pulls inspiration from the nostalgic 1980s game'Oregon Trail', but adds a futuristic twist where gamers can test their skills in a climate change apocalypse. Called'Climate Trail', refugees travel through a world destroyed by climate change while encountering dangerous scenarios, such as heatwaves and melting Artic ice, until they reach a safe zone in Canada. Characters in the game will also stop along the path to share scientific facts about global warming, sea level rise and greenhouse gas emissions throughout the game. In ' Climate Trail ' refugees travel through a world destroyed by climate change while encountering dangerous scenarios, such as heatwaves and melting Artic ice, until they reach a safe zone in Canada The Oregon Trail became a hallmark in elementary schools in the 1980s and was designed to teach children about the lives of 19th-century pioneers as they traveled across the United States in search of a better life. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.

With the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) being held later this month, it might be a good time to start thinking about the very possible future of AI in schools and what it might mean for your children--both the good and the bad. If you're a parent or in the education field, you will no doubt be up to date on the ways that education in public schools and universities across the nation have already been steadily adapting towards a more technology-driven and data-producing form. Gone are the dusty chalkboards, the endless piles of handwritten essays, the class trips to the magical and always-too-warm computer lab, and those annoying moments when "that" student decides to spend 25 minutes staring out of the window while "using the pencil sharpener." Instead, students across the nation are utilizing Google's Chromebooks and collaborating on shared documents. What's more, they're learning to code as a basic element of their curriculum.

With the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) being held later this month, it might be a good time to start thinking about the very possible future of AI in schools and what it might mean for your children -- both the good and the bad. If you're a parent or in the education field, you will no doubt be up to date on the ways that education in public schools and universities across the nation have already been steadily adapting towards a more technology-driven and data-producing form. Gone are the dusty chalkboards, the endless piles of handwritten essays, the class trips to the magical and always-too-warm computer lab, and those annoying moments when "that" student decides to spend 25 minutes staring out of the window while "using the pencil sharpener." Instead, students across the nation are utilizing Google's Chromebooks and collaborating on shared documents. What's more, they're learning to code as a basic element of their curriculum.

If you went to school in the US in the early 1990s, chances are you have fond memories of playing the computer game The Oregon Trail. Now, schoolchildren around the world will be able to replicate that experience thanks to a new Minecraft: Education Edition integration. Before you fire up your version of Minecraft to download this add-on, there's a catch: Because it's specifically an educational endeavor (in partnership with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the add-on is only available through the education edition of the game. This version of The Oregon Trail has been expanded with learning activities and the freedom to create new paths for the game and form their own 19th century communities within it. Previously, the game has worked with the Roald Dahl estate on a writing competition for elementary and middle school students.

The Minnesota Education Computing Corporation might not be the most recognizable game developer today, but if you went to elementary school in the US anytime in the eighties or nineties, then you've almost certainly played -- and probably learned something from -- one of its educational games. The company started in 1973 as an initiative to put more computers into classrooms across Minnesota and eventually created over 300 different software titles, including the version of The Oregon Trail that became the cultural touchstone it is today. Now MECC and The Oregon Trail are finally getting the recognition they deserve in a retrospective exhibit from the Strong, the National Museum of Play. The museum actually inducted The Oregon Trail into the Video Game Hall of Fame back in 2016, and the new exhibit will include playable original versions of the game so younger generations can experience the excitement of hunting for buffalo in all it's 8-bit glory. Aside from teaching countless schoolkids grammar with Word Munchers, MECC is also considered a pioneer in STEM education that popularized computer learning.

Mario the plumber may have got there first, but Sonic was always going to catch up. The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, has announced the latest six inductees to its video game hall of fame – and Sega's iconic hedgehog is among them. Also making the grade for this renowned collection of seminal game titles is interactive soap opera The Sims, gangster adventure Grand Theft Auto III, role-playing favourite Legend of Zelda, educational title Oregon Trail and one of the titles that helped kickstart the video gaming industry, Space Invaders. Strong began its world video game hall of fame last year, introducing the concept with the opening six entrants: Doom, Tetris, Pac-Man, Pong, Super Mario Bros and World of Warcraft. The nomination process is open to the public, but the final annual inductees are chosen by a panel of journalists and game scholars.