How a student teacher created the Oregon Trail game, 50 years ago.
For his classes on westward expansion, Rawitsch decided to try something a little safer: a board game with a big map and some toy covered wagons. “In my college work,” Rawitsch said, “I had seen some examples of educational games that were in a box game format … [and] I was kind of fascinated by the idea that this would be something you do in a classroom that would probably be much more interesting to students than just reading about history.
to a mainframe computer in downtown Minneapolis. The two math teachers sometimes used the machine in their own classrooms; when they weren’t using it, the teletype lived in the school’s janitorial closet.at the time, to his class on Friday, Dec. 3, 1971. “We spent a week on,” Rawitsch remembers, “and so [the students] had four or five days to try it out. And they were … compared to the usual nonexcitement of reading about history … extremely excited to do this and fascinated by the computer.
How, then, did this game go from Rawitsch’s desk to millions of classroom computers around the country? “I was hired by MECC [Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium] in October 1974,” Rawitsch said, “and we had a share library where people could submit programs they had written, and then the staff would decide if they were worthwhile putting in the library [for students across the state]. … So over Thanksgiving weekend I had a cold and I had nothing else to do.
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