One of these students, senior Don Rawitsch, had the idea to create a computer program for a history class he was teaching, and recruited two of his friends, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, both of whom were students teaching math, to help. This game is part of The Strong's MECC Collection and was donated by Susan Schilling, Vice President for MECC Product Development from 1987 to 1996, as well as the Executive Manager of the 1995 edition of Oregon Trail.The Oregon Trail was created in 1971 by three student teachers at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in the HP Time-Shared BASIC environment running on an HP-2100 minicomputer. The Oregon Trail is perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made, but more importantly, it pioneered a blend of learning and play that showcases the valuable contribution games can make to education. The more than 65 million copies of the game that have been sold testify to the game's appealing story and fun play. In the 1970s and 1980s, when computing access was rare, The Oregon Trail not only instructed players in American history but also introduced them to computers.
The game has been widely available ever since, appearing on every major computing platform, from mainframes to smartphones. When Rawitsch joined the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) in 1974, he brought along the code for the game and MECC developed a version for distribution to schools�first in Minnesota and then around the United States. Players had to choose which items to bring, how fast to travel, and what to do when food ran low or disease struck. First programmed on a primitive teletype printer, the game challenged students to assume the role of Western settlers crossing the continent on the way to the Pacific coast. Three student teachers, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, created The Oregon Trail in 1971 to help Minnesota schoolchildren learn American History. As the longest-published, most successful educational game of all time, The Oregon Trail has blazed a path for the use of video games in learning.
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