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.

The belief that AI dominance is imperative for economic development, military control, and strategic competitiveness has accelerated AI development initiatives across countries. The release of national strategic plans has been accompanied by billions of dollars in investment as well as concrete policies to attract relevant talent and technology. In our previous post "How different countries view artificial intelligence", we presented a snapshot of governments' planning for AI, based on our analysis of 34 national strategic AI plans. Our post covered the description of AI plans and categorized countries based on their coverage of various related concepts. In this post, we extend details about what accounts for the variation in countries' AI plans.