Serendipity35

I read an article that mentioned that someone teaching game design was using the old game "The Oregon Trail" as a simple example of game design. I felt a little wave of nostalgia for that computer game that I used with middle school students in the late 1970s on Apple IIe computers.

What can we teach with 40-year-old software?

The game was developed in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. My school subscribed to MECC and received many software packages on the big 5.25 very floppy disks which we could duplicate.

The original game was designed to teach about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The single player is a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail via a covered wagon in 1848. 

But many teachers used it in other ways. In those early day, just teaching students to use the computer and navigate a game was a learning experience. I knew teacher who, like myself, used it was a way to teach cooperation by having players work in pairs or teams and justifiable arguing about choices was encouraged.

I used the game as an example when teaching literature as away to discuss the consequences of actions (draw branching diagram here).
 

Looking at the game again today via one of the several emulators available online (such as https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990 and https://classicreload.com/oregon-trail.html), it seems about as primitive in its graphics as it did back in 1975 in my classroom. But it worked. My homeroom students enjoyed playing it just for gaming fun, and I was able to incorporate the decision-making aspects into lessons. I taught English, not social studies, and was less interested in the historical aspects of the game. I did use it briefly in an interdisciplinary manner with a social studies teacher, but having students do research into the real Oregon Trail and that period seemed to kill interest in the game itself. 

It was one of the most successful games of all time and “The Oregon Trail” was inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. If you played it a few times, many of its screens are probably etched into your memory. I recall entering my real family members' names into the game the first time I played, and then sadly dysentery them "die" along the trail - probably from dysentery. It had game play moments (like hunting buffalo) and simple animation, but it was mostly text and so involved a lot of reading.

I would have my students work in small groups and map the game both on a real map of the trail, and then later on a decision tree style "map" of the game's options.

For me, the strength of the game in the classroom was in understanding how decisions could change the game's outcomes and their traveler's fates.

I recall that students would argue about the design. They didn't like the random things that would happen, such as a fire in the wagon destroying objects that were worth game points. But that also worked its way into my discussions with them of literature. Things happen in novels - and our lives - that seem random and out of our control, and they have consequences.

The other software that I used back then which was more sophisticated (though not graphically) was made by Tom Snyder Productions. I met Snyder at an educational conference and we talked about his Decisions, Decisions series. The series focused on the best aspects of what I was using in "Oregon Trail." The series included products on politics and the environment and came with printed material to supplement the games, so "research" was easy and necessary to play well.

I had no luck finding online what happened to Snyder and his company. It seems to have been consumed by Scholastic, though the link I found was a dead end.  I did find something on Amazon, but it doesn't seem that the series was continued or updated recently. It could easily be an online or mobile game. 

Can we use old software to teach new skills? Absolutely. Though these software packages seem crude by today's standards, they are also "classic" curiosities. I haven't taught secondary school students since 2000, so my sense of what is acceptable is lost. Certainly some of these games, or similar decision-tree kinds of games are a very viable classroom tool at all grade levels K-20. Maybe someone has already updated them or created new versions. If not, there is an opportunity.

     

Last week, I wrote about a ruling against a university by the Department of Justice for not making its free content online fully accessible. I thought that today I should share some resources you can use to evaluate web materials for accessibility.
You might maintain web pages, including things like blogs and online course materials, and if you're not concerned about making sure they’re accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities, you should.
One easy to use accessibility-checking tool is a browser-based one called the WAVE Accessibility Extension. It is available for Firefox and for Chrome at WAVE Chrome Extension. There is also a WAVE Help site.
The ProfHacker blog has done some interesting posts on accessibility topics, from general ones like User-Friendly Advice for Accessible Web Design and How to Evaluate Your Web Pages for Accessibility to one that I think is a good test to try out with students if you're discussing this topic - To Test for Accessibility, Try Navigating Without Your Mouse.   

Ten years ago, I wrote a post here about how K-12 school districts were being quite protective about content that comes into their classroom via the Web. They have good reasons to be more protective and wary - laws and parents, for example - than higher education. Looking at my older posts here is a kind of educational time travel.

In 2006, I was observing from my university position a lot of filtering of content in the K-12 world. I was thinking back to when I had taught in a NJ school district in the 1990s and was also acting as a computer coordinator.

It seems strange that it was only on October 24, 1995 that the FNC unanimously passed a resolution defining the term Internet. Back then, we were already swapping stories at conferences about the things kids were doing on our school computers and wondering how we would "filter" out the bad stuff.

There were a few radicals who thought we shouldn't filter out anything, but the majority used a library comparison. The librarian is a professional who decides what books get into the school; we will have to be the professionals who decide what online content gets into the school.

In 2006, there were schools blocking Google Earth. Why? Because it had a "chat" feature in it and schools blocked all chat. They were blocking AOL Messenger early on and MySpace and social networking sites. They were blocking this Serendipity35 blog. Not that they had anything against me -they were blocking all blogs.

Most of this was done at a server level with blocking software. In the 90's my school had filters in place and we were constantly uncovering hundreds of flaws. The common examples were instances like filtering "breast" so kids didn't see  nude pictures, but also blocking sites that could be used for research on cancer. The filtering net was very wide.

The only discussion in the schools about the complexities of using the Internet in classrooms was going on in meetings and faculty rooms by adults and not in the classrooms with students. It's the bad side of in loco parentis as we also "protected" teachers from being better users of technology and perhaps even better-informed educators.

With technology, sometimes schools are trying to control something they don't really understand. 

The term "Web 2.0" isn't heard much any more. It referred to the web that was becoming rich in interactivity, a read/write web, social networking, collaboration and community building.

That change became a big wave and has not gone away. And schools, particularly in the K-12 sector, still are having issues with it as a part of education. Have students use those computers in their pockets in class, or collect them and hide them during class. If schools do not help students explore new tools, students will explore on their own and schools are less relevant to their lives and the larger world.

My time traveling in this topic from within this blog turned up old headlines like "MySpace.com is facing a new threat on Capitol Hill" and "Kids outsmart Web filters." Given another decade, perhaps I will write about how odd it seemed that in 2016 we would still stop students from using smartphones in class.

People in the edtech world always seem a bit surprised when they find out that I came from a liberal arts background. I was an English/Education undergrad, and my graduate work was in communications and media, and then in pedagogy. I am old enough that being there in the early days of computers in the classroom and pre-Internet, if you were interested in technology, you could get in "on the ground floor" no matter what class you taught. Yes, people expected the computer teacher to be a math or science major, but it didn't turn out that way in all cases.

That's why I am pleased to see articles about topics such as the digital humanities and a recent one on "Why tech industries are demanding more liberal arts graduates." 

"...While liberal arts degrees have been criticized in public by corporate officials, presidential candidates and others, college and university officials continue to laud the value of traditional training in the fields. Data from the American Association of Colleges and Universities shows that unemployment of liberal arts bachelor’s holders is only slightly higher than the national unemployment average of all degree holders — 5.4% to 4.6% respectively, and that long-term earning potential of liberal arts graduates exceeds that of graduates in professional fields by more than $2,000 annually.

Fields like military science and finance depend heavily on liberal arts training for its focus on communication and building teamwork, a concept EAB Senior Analyst Ashley Delamater says is becoming an attractive credential for tech development companies and Silicon Valley’s next wave of executive hiring.

It’s not going to be about radically reorganizing the liberal arts, but reorganizing to create a direct connection to jobs that need the liberal arts today. What are the potential jobs available to our students that they don’t even know they can apply for, and what are the markets that has a lot of openings where one or two courses can help you to add some technical skills to the leadership and liberal arts knowledge base earned in these majors.”