I’m going to show my age in a moment. I’m 26 years old and had a lot of fun experiences with edutainment and there is one I cannot remember the name of but here goes.

1. Oregon Trail…..All throughout my school years right through college, this game was used to teach various things about pioneer life along the Oregon Trail that started in Missouri and ended in Oregon. Anyway, during my Schiller years we had version 2.0 where we used the mouse to hunt. My American History professor at Ohio State used the original MS-DOS version to teach the hardshhips they faced (through a no mouse interface for most of my class….hunting was trickier).

2. Number Maze for the Macintosh. The concept here was to teach math throught the use of opening up gates. The pawns or avatars used were moved by clicking the mouse and if you hit a grated out area…you had to do math to get through it.

3. SuperSolvers Gizmos and Gadgets: Oh my lord this game caused the people who ran my Jr. High computer lab (full of those Allinone Power Macintoshes) to literally break the sound controls. The concept of the game was to teach you various things about the physical sciences.

4. In my Kindergarten youth I remember playing a game on the school’s Apple /// computer where you moved a turtoise on the screen using pascal or basic (cannot remember which). We were learning programming in Kindergarten enough said…

If you define being able to write your own family’s epitaphs (Oregon Trail DOS version), using black and white animations to make math interesting, and building your own vehicle to race which the outcome depended on how hard you looked and how many puzzles you solved added to the score as fun, give me the Glory Days of edutainment when less exposition meant a lot more 🙂