Many people may not realize that The Oregon Trail was originally a game written for teletype machines – what were essentially typewriters connected to a computer mainframe. Those computers originally made-up MECC’s backbone, with one computer shared by each school district using time-sharing. Dale’s interview gives insight into MECC’s decision-making process in 1973, explaining decisions that had a ripple effect across the world of educational computing. Dale recounts:

MECC dispatched two people out to talk to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who were the 21-year-old kids with the new Apple computer. They had already announced their intent to save the world and they were going to help education using the computer. They had no information about what we were doing in Minnesota. They didn’t know anybody was using computers in schools. We told them about MECC and said we’d like to buy five Apple II’s at a special price. They gave us a special price. We brought the five back to Minnesota to sell to Minnesota schools. Minnesota schools not only bought five, but that year we sold over 500 Apple II computers. [...] Moving on to 1980, MECC became the largest seller of Apple computers. And so it happened that Apple got its start in the educational computing business through its Minnesota connection.

What’s also interesting is Dale’s discussion of the decision made to sell MECC, which was a state-owned operation, to a company (MECC would then become the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation). According to Dale, both IBM and Apple weren’t interested in such an acquisition.

In 1971, Don Rawitsch was student teaching as a senior education major at Carleton College. There he observed several peers bringing home teletype machines on the weekends to connect to a computer mainframe. Based upon the interest of his peers, Don concluded that he should use these computers in the classroom, and he quickly began working on a computer simulation called Oregon with two other Carleton students, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann (Rawitsch). The game was purely text-based, but this meager beginning proved the viability of computer simulations within the classroom. In Oregon, students would cooperate with users networked together all around the state of Minnesota to simulate the westward journey of pioneers on the Oregon Trail. While hunting, users would have to type “bang” to shoot their gun without actually ever seeing what they were shooting (Studer 5). It offered a glimpse of the future of educational gaming.

Don would bring the game with him to MECC in 1973, the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. Minnesota was the “clear leader” in the field of educational computing, budgeting more than $5 million annually to MECC (Zucker 400). They proved to be instrumental in the educational movement to implement computers into school districts in the early 1980′s, and software produced by MECC would be used in classrooms across the nation. Beyond word processing, innovation in technology made it possible for computers to run games, and as a result, educators sought new ways to embrace technology and games into the classroom. What emerged was a new genre of software development, called edutainment software (a hybrid of education and entertainment software). The advent of the personal computer made this technology available and affordable, notably the Apple II which early on became the de facto educational standard (Pillar 3). In 1985 MECC released the original Oregon Trail version, that now included sound and was visualized to a far-greater degree. The software released by MECC including The Oregon Trail was more popular than all other educational software companies combined (Studer XI).

Works Cited

Pillar, Charles. “Apple Will Surely Reap What it Sows on the Education Front.” Los Angeles Times. 1 Sept. 1997: 3.

Rawitsch, Don. “Oregon Trail Research.” Email to Dave Lester. 30 March. 2006.

Studer, Wayne. Oregon Trail II: The Official Strategy Guide. N.P.: Prima Publishing, 1995.

Zucker, Andrew. “Computers in Education: National Policy in the USA.” European Journal of Education 17.4 (1982): 395-410.