Games and Education: From The Oregon Trail to Minecraft Classrooms

"Games get in the way of studying" is something people have been saying for a long time. But if you trace back the history of video games, games were in the classroom from quite an early stage. A game made to teach history on school computers became a series that lasted for decades, and games made for entertainment were later used as classroom tools.

In this post, we look at where educational games started, why the 1980s "edutainment" boom happened, and how commercial games such as Minecraft made their way into classrooms. Finally, we also sum up why games help with education and what their limitations are.

Educational Games, Edutainment, and Serious Games

It's easier to understand if we clarify the terms first. They seem similar, but their uses differ slightly.

Term	Meaning	Examples
Edutainment	A blend of education and entertainment. Games that wrap learning content in fun elements	Math Blaster, Carmen Sandiego
Educational games	Games designed to encourage creative thinking and problem solving, often explored without a set order	The Oregon Trail, Minecraft for education
Serious games	Games whose primary purpose is something other than entertainment (education, training, healthcare, research, etc.)	Foldit, various training simulators
Gamification	Attaching game elements such as points, levels, and rewards to non-game activities	Streak rewards in learning apps

English Wikipedia's article on educational games divides edutainment, "which repeats learning content in a linear way wrapped in a fun exterior," from educational games, "which encourage creative thinking, problem solving, and more interaction." In practice the line is blurry, but this distinction is a good yardstick for thinking about "which games truly make you learn."

The idea of teaching something through games is itself very old. Snakes and Ladders traditionally showed the consequences of good and bad deeds by moving up and down squares, and The Landlord's Game, created in 1903 by Lizzie Magie, was a board game designed to show the problems of the land ownership system and later became the prototype for Monopoly.

The Starting Point: The Oregon Trail on a Mainframe

On the video game side, the work regarded as the root of educational games is The Oregon Trail. It was created in 1971 by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, students at Carleton College in Minnesota. When Rawitsch was assigned to teach a history class at a junior high school in Minneapolis, they made the game in about two weeks to teach about the lives of 19th-century Western pioneers.

At the time, school computers had no monitors and were connected to teleprinters that printed text on paper. So the first version had no graphics at all. Players lead a wagon train in 1847 from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, buying food and ammunition, hunting, and responding to events such as storms and broken wagons. When hunting, you had to type words like "BANG" quickly.

It was very popular with students, but it was deleted from the school mainframe when the semester ended. In 1974, Rawitsch recreated the game at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), this time adjusting the probabilities of events by referring to actual pioneers' diaries and records. It was later ported to personal computers such as the Apple II, and in 1985 it was reborn as a commercial game with graphics. The series has sold more than 65 million copies in total and was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

The Oregon Trail matters because it wasn't "a game that makes you memorize historical knowledge" but "a game that makes you choose as a person in history." While deciding how much food to buy and when to rest, students come to feel the hardships of the pioneer era firsthand.

The 1980s Edutainment Boom

There were also industry circumstances behind the sharp rise in educational games in the early 1980s. The video game crash of 1983 in North America brought down the home console market, and home computers filled the gap. At the same time, arcades were beset by controversies over violence and addiction. Computer game companies saw educational games that kids could enjoy and parents and teachers could be satisfied with as a new market. Around 1983, the term "edutainment" began appearing in advertising and the press.

Representative titles of this era include the following.

Math Blaster! (1983): A game made by former teacher Jan Davidson in which you shoot the correct answer to a math problem on screen with a cannon. It had an editing feature that let teachers and parents create their own problems. The first title was simple drill practice, but a story was added starting with the 1987 sequel.
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985): A game made by Broderbund in which the player becomes a detective chasing a thief around the world. Solving clues required geography knowledge, and the game came packaged with The World Almanac.
Reader Rabbit and the Zoombinis series: Series from The Learning Company dealing with reading and logical thinking, widely used in homes and schools through the 1990s.

These games became many children's first computer experience. However, they were also dogged by criticism that they "just put a game shell over problem drills." This criticism became the impetus for "serious games," which put education and training ahead of entertainment, to establish themselves as a separate branch.

Handheld Devices and "Brain Training"

Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, released for the Nintendo DS in 2005, showed that an educational game could become a mainstream commercial game. Inspired by the research of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, it had players solve a little each day of arithmetic problems, the Stroop test, sudoku, and more. According to Nintendo's figures, it sold 19.01 million copies worldwide as of September 2015.

But this game was also followed by controversy over its scientific effects. Critics pointed out that even if your "brain age" got younger in the game, it wasn't clear whether that led to improved cognitive ability in everyday life. The need to distinguish in-game results from actual learning effects remains an important question when looking at educational games today.

Commercial Games Enter the Classroom

There are also many cases where games not made for education are used in education. SimCity makes players think about the social and economic problems of running a city, and Civilization and Age of Empires make them think about history, politics, and economics. These games don't tell you the answer; they let players realize principles by testing the rules themselves.

Minecraft Education

The most representative example is Minecraft. In 2011, the MinecraftEdu project, which helped schools use Minecraft, began in collaboration with Mojang. Teachers could check students' progress, and students could capture and submit screenshots as proof of completing assignments. After Microsoft acquired Mojang, the school-focused Minecraft: Education Edition was officially released on November 1, 2016. It includes premade lesson plans and teacher management features, and it's now available on Windows, Mac, iPad, Chromebook, and more.

Minecraft has also been used beyond a classroom tool, as a space for conveying social messages. On March 12, 2020, Reporters Without Borders opened "The Uncensored Library" inside Minecraft, containing articles banned in various countries as in-game books. It took advantage of the fact that game servers could be accessed even in countries where press access is blocked.

Assassin's Creed Discovery Tour

In February 2018, Ubisoft added a "Discovery Tour" mode with all combat removed to Assassin's Creed Origins. It consists of 75 guided tours introducing the ruins and daily life of ancient Egypt, based on materials from historians and Egyptologists. A key feature is that it was made so teachers could show it directly to students. The same mode was later added to sequels covering Greece and the Viking age. However, there is also criticism that parts changed for the game's presentation differ from actual history, so teacher commentary is needed when using it in class.

Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal Space Program, officially released in 2015, is a spaceflight simulation that implements orbital mechanics fairly realistically. Players design their own rockets, put them into orbit, and learn real maneuvers such as the Hohmann transfer orbit. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) collaborated with the game, and an educational version, KerbalEdu, was also made.

When Games Help Research: Foldit

Beyond being a learning tool, games can also be a gateway to taking part in real scientific research. Foldit, made by the University of Washington, is a game in which you fold protein structures like a puzzle. Researchers analyze the high-scoring structures that players find.

In 2011, Foldit players helped determine the structure of a protease from a monkey virus (M-PMV). It was a problem that had gone unsolved for 15 years, but after the puzzle was released, players produced a sufficiently accurate 3D model within ten days. It's a landmark case showing that non-experts can take part in scientific research through the format of a game.

Why Games Make People Learn

The points education researchers focus on in games can be summarized as follows.

A structure where you try again after failing: In games, failure isn't the end but information for the next attempt. This is sometimes called "productive failure." It's less burdensome than a wrong answer on a test, so students keep trying.
Immediate feedback: Since the results of choices appear on screen right away, students can quickly learn the relationship between cause and effect.
Learning by doing: As in The Oregon Trail or Kerbal Space Program, students understand principles by operating the system themselves instead of listening to explanations.
Appropriate difficulty scaling: A well-made game naturally progresses from easy stages to hard ones, helping students stay focused between boredom and frustration.

A good educational game is less "a game that makes you study" and more "a game you can't win without thinking."

Limitations and Caveats

Games aren't a cure-all. Psychologist Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, who has studied educational games, has criticized many studies on the educational effects of games for weak methodology. Some caveats are as follows.

Fun and learning can be disconnected: Games where problem solving and rewards are separated can make students focus only on rewards rather than the problems.
In-game achievement ≠ real ability: As with the brain training controversy, a rising game score doesn't guarantee that the ability transfers to other situations.
The teacher's role: As in the Discovery Tour case, what a game shows isn't always accurate. When using games in class, the effect is greater when accompanied by explanation and discussion before and after.
Devices and access: Not every school and household has the same devices, so game-based lessons can create gaps.

Summary

From The Oregon Trail's teleprinter to Minecraft's classroom servers, games and education have walked together for more than 50 years. They started from "wrapping study in fun," but have gradually expanded to "realizing principles by doing it yourself," and further to "solving real problems together."

Puzzle games connect to this trend as well, because the process of observing rules, forming hypotheses, and testing them is itself practice in logical thinking. It's worth remembering that when using games in education, the role of the person who connects what happens in the game to real learning is as important as choosing the game.