The majority of my formative years were spent growing up in Minnesota. I didn’t realize until much later in life that I had advantages afforded to me, from a computer technology standpoint, that other states simply did not have. MECC, originally the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and later the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation, was one of the most important software organizations in the nation. It started in 1973 as a group working to connect schools to shared mainframe computers. By 1977, 95% of Minnesota schoolchildren had some form of access to computers in the classroom. As a result of their close relationship with Apple in the 80s, they were responsible for creating Apple labs not only in Minnesota schools but also in over 4,500 school systems outside the state.
While they started out focused on hardware access, MECC soon transformed into an educational software publisher. Their most famous educational game has become a household name, and Generation X and Millennials will certainly have heard of and played some of their other titles. Let’s take a look at some of the most influential MECC educational games.
Oregon Trail – Apple II
Oregon Trail
The endlessly meme-able historic simulation that put educational gaming, or edutainment, on the map. The development of this game actually predates MECC by a few years. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created the first version in 1971 for Rawitsch’s eighth-grade history class. Rawitsch joined MECC in 1974, and the game was added to the MECC system in the mid 70s. In 1985, it became a much larger stand-alone product for the Apple II. What made it important was not just popularity, but form. The Oregon Trail turned history into a decision-driven survival simulation, so students learned through trade-offs, scarcity, geography, and consequences rather than memorization alone. It remained central to MECC for decades and ultimately became the company’s defining cultural artifact.
Word Munchers
Introduced in 1985, Word Munchers was one of the games that proved MECC could make drill-oriented learning feel genuinely playful. It won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award that year. Later deluxe versions expanded it into a broad language arts package covering reading, grammar, vocabulary, phonics, parts of speech, and related word skills. In students’ memories, this is one of the quintessential school lab games because it wrapped language practice in fast, arcade-style pressure, using a gameplay style that vaguely emulated the popular Pac-Man.
Number Munchers – MS-DOS
Number Munchers
This was the math counterpart to MECC’s Word Munches and another of their signature games. Number Munchers was a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner in 1986, and later one of the company’s first titles to span Apple II, Macintosh, and MS-DOS. In design terms, it distilled arithmetic and number sense into a quick chase format built around factors, equalities, and similar rule recognition, which is exactly why it stuck in so many students’ memories.
Storybook Weaver
This title is important because it reveals a different side of MECC’s educational philosophy. MECC listed Storybook Weaver among its new titles in 1990, then later reintroduced it for Mac and Windows and expanded it into Storybook Weaver Deluxe, which combined it with My Own Stories and added more art and technical features. Instead of teaching through simulation or drill, it emphasized authorship, composition, illustration, and multimedia storytelling. For many students, this was MECC at its most open-ended and creative.
Odell Lake – Apple II
Odell Lake
Odell Lake shows MECC was never only about frontier history and word drills. MECC later grouped it with The Oregon Trail and Number Munchers as one of its “Programs of the Decade,” and Odell Down Under was explicitly marketed as an expanded successor to the “classroom classic” Odell Lake. Its importance lies in the fact that it taught ecology through systems and survival. The game focused on predator-prey relationships, recognition, and environmental consequences rather than on simple question-and-answer prompts.
MECC was responsible for many other titles, including several Oregon Trail sequels. Unfortunately, in the mid-90s, MECC underwent a consolidation and was acquired by SoftKey. In 1996, the company was renamed The Learning Company, and by 1999, it had been shuttered altogether. Today, a variety of companies own the trademarks for MECC’s software library, with Oregon Trail continuing to appear in various forms on many modern platforms.
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