How to play the 6 best education gaming classics of all time
How to play the 6 best education gaming classics of all time
How to play the 6 best education gaming classics of all time
By Ben Gilbert
April 11, 2020
Summary
Through the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library project that catalogs everything from websites to software, the vast majority of MECC's library of classic educational games is available.
First, and most importantly, is "The Oregon Trail" - an MS-DOS version of the game that, thanks to modern technology, can just outright run through emulation in a web browser.
Everyone remembers "Sim City," which was of course fantastic itself, but another delightfully smart management game of the time was "Dinopark Tycoon." Rather than managing a city and its citizens, you built a dinosaur theme park, built a business, and accidentally learned a ton of stuff along the way.
Like so many of MECC's games, "Dinopark Tycoon" is charming and memorable - and manages to stand the test of time decades later.
Sure, you could go outside and set up a lemonade stand on your front stoop - but maybe wait on going that route for a few months, and get some practice instead with the gaming classic "Lemonade Stand."
Few games do a better job of teaching multiples, fractions, and other foundational mathematic principles as the "Number Munchers" games do.
They have exactly the right tone for the age group they're aimed at, and they're shockingly fun to play whether you're just learning multiples or, as it turns out, a 35-year-old with a strong grasp of basic math writing an article about classic edutainment games.
It's the same silly tone and easy to understand framework of the math-based "Munchers" game, but with a slightly different focus.
A throughline that runs through all of the MECC educational games is fun, above all else.
This is perhaps best-evidenced in "The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary," a puzzle-based game that I didn't even realize was an education game as a child - I thought the teachers had made a mistake, and put a regular game on the school computers.
Reference
Gilbert, B. (2020, April 11). How to play the best educational game classics of all time, from 'The Oregon Trail' to 'Number Munchers'. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-play-the-oregon-trail-online-2020-4