An Adventure in Cooperative Learning
What is Wagon Train 1848?
Wagon train 1848 is an adventure in cooperative learning based on The Oregon Trail game. It allowed a classroom full of students to all be part of the same multiplayer adventure. Each Mac computer represents a covered wagon train traveling west on the Oregon Trail. Players work together, as they journey across the rugged landscape of nineteenth-century America.
While many games today offer collaborative efforts in the classroom, Wagon Train 1848 from MECC was the first to offer such an experience when most educational environments offered individualized experiences on one of the popular 8 or 16 bit computing platforms of the day.
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Both Oregon Train and Wagon Train 1848 were identical in content and other experiences. The clear exception was the fact that Wagon Train 1848 was designed to be networked with multiple computers and was perfect for the educational environment. In 1991 when the program was released, networking on personal computers just starting to become prevalent within the school environments thanks to AppleTalk and PhoneNet networking.
Some of the other elements offered within Wagon Train 1848 included the ability to trade with other Wagons. However, unlike the individualized effort aspect of the retail version or Oregon Trail, in Wagon Train 1848, you and your entire Wagon Train were required to stay together, thus allowing in a completely shared experience of a team. This included the aspect of one member having issues or moving at a slower pace than the rest of the team, Wagon Train 1848 put the team members in the position of being helpers to the other members.
While the label on the package says MECC, it was Apple Computer, Inc. who funded a large part of the program, allowing Wagon Train 1848 to become a mainstay for the educational environment. This fit into Apple’s desire to sell more computers into the educational realm and to push fully networked computer labs into the mainstream.
Management Password: bang
System Requirements
Architecture: 68k
Macintosh Plus or better.
System 6.0.2 or newer.
AppleShare must be turned on
Download Single Disk Version
The Macintosh platform emulators we recommend are Mini vMac, Macintosh.JS and Ample (MAME). Anyone of these three should work fine depending on the level of support you want with the program.
Game Details
- A — Menu Bar
- File menu: Save an unfinished game; load a saved game; quit.
- Game menu: Display introductory information; toggle sound On/Off
- Management menu: For Teachers. You don’t need to use any Menu Bar commands while you are traveling the trail.
- B — Wagon Animation Panel
- Shows your wagon traveling the trail.
- watch here for weather changes.
- C — Map Panel
- Shows the entire trail.
- The thick line shows your progress.
- D — “Conditions” Panel
- Shows the date, weather, distance to next landmark, distance traveled, pace, rations, food supply, and overall health of the people in the wagon.
- Conditions can influence your decisions. For example, if your health is poor you may decide to rest.
- E — Trail Log
- Informs you of events that occur along the trail. Keep an eye on it!
- Important events appear in bold type.
- To scroll through the log, click the up/down arrows or drag the box.
- F — Time Out Button
- Allows you to interrupt the program itself (which is different from resting along the Trail or quitting the program).
- Other members of the train just agree to a time out (unless a Captain orders it).
- During a time out, the name on the button changes to “Continue”.
- G — Control Buttons
- Provide access to things that you can do along the trail.
History
According to Wagon Train 1848 Dev team member, Brian Bezanson:
I was one of the Mac Developers on Wagon Train 1848/Oregon Trail. They shipped in 1990/1991.
I will say working on the Mac version of the Oregon Trail at MECC from 1990-1992 was a great experience. We had a great team of people that helped introduce it to more people and more depth. The network version that we did, “Wagon Train 1848” was one of the first collaborative network games in modern computers.
“Wagon Train 1848” was the first version of Oregon Trail of Apple’s Macintosh computers. It was released at the same time as the Mac version of the Oregon Trail, but it was only available to schools.
They were identical except for the fact that Wagon Train 1848 was designed to be networked with multiple computers and perfect for a school setting. Networking on personal computers was finally into the schools with AppleTalk and PhoneNet networking.
It added some other elements as you could trade with other Wagons and your entire Wagon Train had to stay together, so if one was slower or had more issues, the others had to help.
Apple Computer funded a large part of Wagon Train 1848 to be available for the schools. They wanted to push networking computer labs together.
The latest version of Oregon Trail sold in the Apple App Store is very well done and goes to another level. Going from our original “done in a 30-minute class” to now taking hours and hours to complete with all the side missions. The Mac version ran a single floppy disc. Forget if they were 400K or 800K discs. If you had a color Mac there was an additional floppy that had the graphics on it that you would need to swap in and out.
So much has changed technically in how the experience can be delivered but the underlying design and goals changed how computers could be integrated into learning more than just history.