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.