In 1964 a group of sixth-graders in Westchester County, New York, sat at a typewriter terminal and ruled a city in ancient Sumer. The Sumerian Game opened with a slide show about the land around 3500 BC, then handed each pupil the role of Luduga, priest-ruler of Lagash, and a run of harvests to manage. Floods, fires and rotting grain arrived at random, and the computer typed out what had become of the crops and the people. Seven years later three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote The Oregon Trail, and the idea that a game could teach went from a research project to a classroom staple. By the mid-1980s it was a market with its own name, “edutainment”, and an argument about whether the fun was helping the learning or getting in its way.
Fast facts
- First known example: The Sumerian Game, Westchester County schools (BOCES) with IBM, played by sixth-graders from 1964.
- Classroom classic: The Oregon Trail, 1971; published by MECC from 1975.
- The word: “edutainment” was in an American advert by October 1982 and in common use by 1984.
- American best-sellers: Math Blaster! (Davidson & Associates), Rocky’s Boots and Reader Rabbit (The Learning Company), Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (Brøderbund), Word Munchers and Number Munchers (MECC).
- British examples: Granny’s Garden (4Mation, 1983) in primary schools; the Fun School series (Database Software, part of Europress) at home.
Teaching at a teletype
The Sumerian Game came out of a joint project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of northern Westchester County and IBM. It was designed by Mabel Addis, a teacher who had studied ancient history, and programmed by William McKay of IBM; in 2023 the Game Developers Choice Awards gave Addis their Pioneer Award, posthumously, describing her as the first female game designer. The project’s final report, in June 1967, described sixth-grade pupils who played its economics games while a control group was taught the same material in the ordinary way. A much shorter game about running Sumer’s grain store, Hamurabi, spread through the BASIC books of the 1970s; the Vault’s entries on simulation games and management games follow that line.
The Oregon Trail began the same way, as a classroom exercise on a time-sharing terminal that printed every line on paper. Don Rawitsch was teaching his eighth-grade class about the American West, and the game made them choose between food, oxen and ammunition and then live with the result. MECC put it on its network in 1975 and onto the Apple II in 1980, and by the late 1980s it was in schools across North America.
The edutainment boom
Home computers turned a school tool into a consumer product. By October 1982 the Milliken Publishing Company was advertising its EduFun! programs to Atari owners with the line “For your edutainment”. In 1984 COMPUTE!’s Gazette found the Commodore 64 buried under “curriculum-based software, educational games, ‘edutainment’ packages, drill-and-practice programs — the list is extensive and confusing”, and Commodore’s Neil Harris told the magazine that “educational games have caught up to [entertainment] games in quality”.
The best-known programs dressed a lesson in an arcade game or a mystery:
- Math Blaster! Davidson & Associates’ program, for the Apple II and IBM PC, let a child pick a subject from addition to decimals and a level from first grade upwards. Electronic Games described the title game in October 1984: the player shot a man out of a cannon at the right answer before a balloon fell to the bottom of the screen.
- Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Brøderbund’s 1985 detective game sent players after an international gang of thieves, with a copy of The World Almanac in the box for working out the clues. It cost $39.95, and it was a geography lesson that game players chose for themselves: in June 1985 it was in the top thirty of Computer Gaming World‘s readers’ poll, among the war games and Zork.
- Word Munchers and Number Munchers. MECC’s 1986 Word Munchers, for grades one to five on the Apple II at $49, had the player steer a Muncher round a grid eating words with a given vowel sound while dodging the Troggles. Teachers could choose the sounds and the difficulty from about 1,700 words. Number Munchers applied the same game to arithmetic and was still on sale in 1992, with a Parents’ Choice award on the advert.
In Britain the state shaped the classroom. Schools bought their first micros with government subsidy, and the Microelectronics Education Programme paid teachers to write programs for them; the Vault’s entry on educational software tells that story, and how Granny’s Garden became the adventure a generation of primary-school children remember. The commercial publishers tried too. In September 1984 Quicksilva announced an “Edutainment Division” with the slogan “QED The Brainlords”, promising “edventures” that mixed fantasy adventure with history questions. “Most existing programs are totally passive,” its managing director, Rod Cousens, told Sinclair User. “You have got to do something with the computer which is different from textbook education.”
At home, the Fun School series from Database Software, part of the Europress group, ran on the 8-bit machines and then the Atari ST and Amiga. Each title came in three versions by age group, from under-sixes to twelve-year-olds, and each was a collection of small games: Fun School 2 had eight on every disk. When Fun School 2 entered Sinclair User’s Spectrum chart in May 1989 the magazine admitted it was “stunned”: “educational software hasn’t done this well on the Spectrum” for years.
Good and bad edutainment
The word was never only praise. In September 1984 Family Computing asked Kenneth Komoski, executive director of the Educational Products Information Exchange Institute (EPIE), what he thought of entertainment-oriented programs. His non-profit institute reviewed computers, software and other materials for schools, and had just published a guide to more than 5,000 educational programs. “There’s good edutainment, like ‘Sesame Street,’ on TV,” he said. “But there’s also bad edutainment. You can tell the difference by the results.” Some companies, he said, were putting out home software “that’s more attractive than it is carefully crafted. If they keep it up, kids may begin to say, ‘If it isn’t fun, I won’t bother with it.’ Designers shouldn’t sacrifice motivation, but they should add intellectual protein.”
The programs people remember tend to be the ones where the subject was the game. In The Oregon Trail the history decided whether the family reached Oregon; in Carmen Sandiego the geography was the detective work; in Rocky’s Boots the logic gates were the machine you built. In Math Blaster! and its many imitators the sums were a gate to pass before the shooting, and a child could see the difference.
After the boom
CD-ROM gave edutainment its last great expansion in the 1990s, and then the market consolidated. By 1998 MECC, The Learning Company and Brøderbund all belonged to the former SoftKey, which had taken The Learning Company’s name. Mattel bought that company for $3.5 billion in 1999 and gave it away the following year. Some of the games outlived their publishers: The Oregon Trail was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016, and the Strong museum calls it “perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made”.
Sources
- Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong, Finding Aid to the Sumerian Game Collection (2016) (web, secondary): BOCES in northern Westchester County; the slide show, Luduga I of Lagash, the agricultural decisions and random disasters; printouts dated 1964. https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-the-Sumerian-Game-collection_2021.pdf
- Richard L. Wing and others, “The Production and Evaluation of Three Computer-Based Economics Games for the Sixth Grade: Final Report”, Westchester County BOCES, June 1967, ERIC ED014227 (web): the games, the experimental and control groups. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED014227
- “Recipients of the 2023 GDCA Pioneer and Lifetime Achievement Awards announced”, GfxSpeak, 2023 (web, secondary): Mabel Addis’s posthumous Pioneer Award, her teaching and her degree in ancient history. https://gfxspeak.com/newswatch/recipients-of-the-2023-gdca-pioneer-and-lifetime-achievement-awards-announced/
- “The Sumerian Game”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the BOCES and IBM project, Mabel Addis and William McKay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sumerian_Game
- For The Oregon Trail, its authors, MECC and the Hall of Fame, see the Oregon Trail entry and its sources, among them Don Rawitsch, “Oregon Trail”, Creative Computing, May–June 1978, pp. 132–139, and the Strong National Museum of Play’s World Video Game Hall of Fame page.
- Antic volume 1 issue 4, October 1982, p. 31: Milliken Publishing advertisement for EduFun! (“For your edutainment”).
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette issue 15, September 1984, p. 24: educational software for the Commodore 64 and Neil Harris’s comments.
- Sinclair User issue 30, September 1984, p. 9: “Quicksilva develops games for the classroom” and Rod Cousens’s quotation.
- Family Computing volume 2 issue 9, September 1984, pp. 54–56: interview with Kenneth Komoski of EPIE.
- Electronic Games volume 2 issue 15, October 1984, p. 76: Math Blaster! described.
- Computer Gaming World issue 22, June 1985, p. 10 (Brøderbund’s announcement of Carmen Sandiego, $39.95, with The World Almanac) and p. 46 (readers’ poll).
- Family Computing volume 3 issue 5, May 1985: Carmen Sandiego with the 1985 World Almanac and a map.
- COMPUTE! issue 69, February 1986, p. 88: Word Munchers (grades 1–5, the Troggles, about 1,700 words, $49).
- COMPUTE! issue 138, February 1992: advertisement listing Number Munchers ($49.95, Parents’ Choice award).
- Amstrad Action issue 34, July 1988: mail-order listing of Fun School for three age groups.
- Sinclair User issue 86, May 1989, pp. 42–43: the Spectrum chart and the comment on Fun School 2.
- ST/Amiga Format issue 12, June 1989: Fun School 2, “each contains 8 educational games”, in three age bands.
- Amiga Format issue 7, February 1990, p. 129: Fun School 2 from Database Software.
- For the MEP, the school-computer subsidies and Granny’s Garden, see the educational software entry; for SoftKey, Mattel and The Learning Company, the Learning Company and Brøderbund entries and their sources.