smart computer use?

I stumbled across an interesting read at the Early Ed Watch blog today that got me reminiscing about all the educational computer games that I played back in the ’80s and early ’90s. I was a kid during that time, being born in 1979.

Computer gaming was reaching the classrooms, and I logged my fair share of Number Munchers hours. Imagine that. Learn and play video games at the same time. It was novel concept back in those days.

From Early Ed Watch I worked my way over to an article titled “The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s“. What a good read.

From Educational Games Research:

People who grew up playing videogames are influenced by them, especially when designing games of their own. Those who played through the 1980s are reaching their professional prime, and the games they played in school are worth examining. Here we’ll take a look at what I consider to be the top ten most influential educational games from the 1980s.

I guess I fall into this category of people who grew up playing video games in the 1980s. I must read on. This is getting interesting…

After reading about and being reminded of the classics like Sim City, Number Munchers and Oregon Trail, I just want to play some of these games to see what my impressions of them are now as opposed to how I thought they were awesome when I was a kid.

This guy over here named Justin uncovered a couple links to both Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. I had to try to see if I could get them running.

First try was Number Munchers. Nuts. I can’t seem to get their emulator plugin to download into FireFox. The download fails.

Well, maybe I can get into the Maxis site where Sim City can be played online for free. Good times.