News

This is the page where all of the headlines appear for the entire site. Specific tuned articles are under the individual sections.

• Oregon Trail II – The Expansion of a Franchise
  by Wayne Studer 25th Anniversary Edition of Oregon Trail II in Wood Box It’s now roughly a quarter-century since MECC set about expanding upon The Oregon Trail to create Oregon Trail II. The “core four” creative team (producer Craig Copley, lead programmer Steve Splinter, lead artist Charolyn Kapplinger, and I, Wayne Studer, as project director, lead designer, lead writer, and historian), supported by literally scores of our MECC colleagues, knew we had a daunting task ahead of us. We really weren’t setting out to “improve upon” The Oregon Trail—for how can you truly improve upon what had already come to…
• 50 Years of Oregon Trail Games
  In 1977, I was playing a game on a teletype at Ansbach American High School which had been written several years before. The game was something called Oregon Trail and the objective was to get to Oregon without dying. Simple enough play, yet difficult to win, if there was any such thing with the game. From where I stood, it was more like the survival of running through the meat grinder. Most my fellow students who played the game did nothing to dispel this adage and each game ended much in a similar manner. Running out of food, running out…
• Accuracy of educational software
  Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the educational software that your children are using? One of the things that made MECC so good at what they did and made them so widely used in nearly every corner of the educational world is the fact that the software was based on facts. This means, real world, hard facts that are available to everyone who researches this aspects of the particular title. No where is this more evident than in the title, Odell Lake. Even today, the details of the ecosystems described in the Odell Lake manual are nearly identical…
• Japan School Year 2021-2022 Begins
  Well, the new school year has started in Japan. Japan is one of the few countries around the globe that starts their school year in the spring. Generally, this occurs sometime between the 1st and the 12th of April with the end of the school year coming in the third week of March. At one time during the past year, the Japanese government contemplated changing this system to match the rest of the world but it was decided that the change would be too costly at a time when Covid-19 has made funds for such things relatively scarce. But this…
• 1800’s Covered Wagon Tracks Still Exists
  If you ever wondered what happens when 500,000 people pass through a place on earth, mostly on covered wagons, well, the Oregon Trail can provide a myriad of evidence of the result. The paths cut into the limestone in Wyoming still show today the evidence of the passage of the wagons, in which many many people traveled the trail to Oregon Territory. Mobile Instinct, a video log type organization run by a single person, “Chris”, has a number of videos of these tracks in videos they have produced and published on Youtube. This particular one is very telling of the…
• Update 2020-2021 School Year
  This has been a weird year with many schools not even starting up. Many of the teachers are still at home instead of home rooms and their students roam the halls of their homes rather than the halls of the schools. This is a situation brought about by one of the worst pandemic’s of the past 100 years. Nearly 100 years to the date of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Covid-19 pandemic has struck many communities around the globe very hard this year and stay at home orders, mask orders and social distancing have become the norm. But alas, education…
• Update School Year 2019-2020
  Welcome to the new MECC.co website. Being as for the past several years, we have been running a slightly out of date site that needed some severe updates, we have decided to institute some changes just in time for the start of the 2019-2020 school year. When we decided to move away from our old software, we knew that a conscious effort to include a ton of the missing materials that made MECC famous. Be sure to check out the legacy catalogs and the titles that were prominent in the 1980’s and 1990’s. With the addition of the new material,…
• Sites of the Oregon Trail — Shoshone Falls
  Being an educator means also trying out cool things in the summers which will benefit your students in the fall when you return to tell the stories of what YOU did over the summer, while most of the students are trying to remember if there even was anything that summer. For me, this summer meant a short trip to Shoshone Falls, Idaho and one of the most breath taking views I have photographed. We always talk about the heartiness of the folks who traveled the trail and who made their way to Oregon Territory but the falls and the sheer…
• Oregon Trail History on 40th Anniversary of the game
  http://www.citypages.com/news/oregon-trail-how-three-minnesotans-forged-its-path-6745749 Don Rawitsch rolled out a four-foot-long piece of white butcher paper on the living room floor of his Crystal apartment. He glanced at an open map of the United States frontier from the 1800s. Then he traced a squiggly line from the right side of the paper to the left. By the time his roommates Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger returned home, the line had become a series of squares leading across a map of the western U.S. Rawitsch was scratching out words on a stack of cards. “Broken wagon wheel,” said one. “Snakebite,” said another. Heinemann, Rawitsch, and…
• [RUN”HISTORY #3] Learning by Doing – MECC and the Apple II
  By J. Arcane From: Colony of Gamers Forums Learning by Doing Minnesota is probably not the first name on most people’s minds as a hot spot of technology, but back in the 1960s, it was one of the centers of mainframe computing. CDC was in Minneapolis, so was GE’s UNIVAC, and the University of Minnesota was beginning to experiment with computer learning. A grassroots movement made mostly of math teachers who had spent time on these machines, was experimenting with setting up TTY terminals in classrooms connected by modem to whatever timeshare machine they could get time on. By the…
• MECC.co Project Begins
  Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) in coordination with a number of former Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) staff have begun the MECC.co Project. The project is an effort to gather and make available all of the former MECC retro library software and tools for teachers of this generation to use. The project includes over over 300 software titles, manuals, floppy disks and other related materials that are necessary to fully utilize the MECC software. This includes all of the Home titles, the Educational titles, and other items of interest to teachers. The project is being led by A.P.P.L.E.’s own…
• The Fish, The Frog, and The Goat
  But wait, there’s more! There’s the Original Ginsu and the Practice Pizza Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (specifically 2520 Broadway in Lauderdale) Cynthia Schroeder (the Atari Lead Programmer) was getting married. The lesser programmers, Shane McCarron, Lance Allred and Craig Carlson decided to get her a fine wedding gift. What better than to go to the All Night Wicker Emporium and purchase a fine wicker Frog? And as we all know, what is a Frog without a Fish? But not just any fish. It had to fit in your hand and allow you to hold hot things without…
• MECC, The Internet, and Kid Safety
  We pledge that MECC’s World-Wide Web site is safe for kids! The media is full of stories about adult content that is available on the Internet. While we believe that the extent of this situation has been vastly overplayed by the press, we also believe that many parents and others are concerned about what (or who) their kids might run into while “surfing” the Internet. At MECC, our focus is the child. You never find anything at our site that is inappropriate for children. We’ll go even one step further! We pledge to make sure that anything that kids can link…
• At MECC Our Focus Is the Child
  At MECC we believe that: Children know how to have fun. Children don’t need to be passively entertained. They want inviting environments that cultivate their talents and ignite their interests. We value kids as active, playful participants. We see the child as playing “inside” our products. Children know how to learn. Children don’t need to be coerced into learning. Our programs invite learning where children are free to explore, discover, and master new concepts. Children are impressionable. Technology is a powerful influence on young minds. We take this responsibility very seriously. The environment we create for children respects the individual,…
• Oregon Trail II Bibliography
  More than two hundred primary and secondary sources were consulted in the extensive research that went into creating Oregon Trail® II and ensuring its historical and geographical accuracy. It would be impractical to try to list all of these sources here, but the following selected bibliography cites the books that proved most consistently useful and provided the greatest amount of information actually incorporated into the program. If you’re interested in learning more about the western trails, you may be able to find many of these books at your local library. Primary (First-hand) Sources Barton, Lois, ed. One Woman’s West: Recollections…
• Oregon Trail vs Oregon Trail II
  OREGON TRAIL 100 hand drawn images 19 folk songs to sing along with One level of play Travel the Oregon Trail from one departure point to one destination Travel the trail only in 1848 Choice of 8 occupations OREGON TRAIL II 5,000 realistic images, including photographs and 3 dimensional renderings of towns and forts. Film-like soundtrack, plus 46 tunes Multiple levels of play Choose from the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails and multiple departure points and destinations for over 100 possible routes. Travel any time from 1840 to 1860 – the exerience is different every year Create your own character…
• MECC Announced Amazon Trail II
  MECC Announces Amazon Trail II,a CD-ROM Rainforest Adventure MECC announces the upcoming release of Amazon Trail II, a rainforest adventure CD-ROM. The new product has been dramatically upgraded from MECC’s original Amazon Trail CD, which has sold more than one million units and received the coveted 1996 Newsweek Editors Choice Award.  Amazon Trail II features approximately 70 live actors whose voices and images have been recorded, digitized and placed in three-dimensional settings for a first-person “you are there” effect. The characters all are part of an integrated fictional story in which players must “prove they are worthy” to receive critical…
• The Oregon Trail Turns 25 Years Old
  Minneapolis, Minnesota — May 17, 1996 — The Oregon Trail series-the classic, longest-selling, award-winning software from MECC, has become the first educational software title to endure for one quarter of a century. A special Oregon Trail 25th Anniversary limited edition will be available beginning in late September 1996 while supplies last. “The Oregon Trail and the educational software industry have grown up together,” said MECC President and CEO Dale LaFrenz. “It’s been an exciting journey along the technological and educational highways. Like the original Oregon Trail emigration, The Oregon Trail has captured the hearts and minds of American families. In…
• An Interview with Dale Eugene Lafrenz, MECC CEO
  Original Posting of this interview:https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107423 Minneapolis MN Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Processing University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Copyright, Charles Babbage Institute Dale LaFrenz Interview 13 April 1995 Abstract After briefly discussing his educational background, he relates his initial exposure with computing in the classroom while teaching at the University of Minnesota high school. He discusses their use of early BASIC through telecommunications to Dartmouth and the spread of computing use to local schools. LaFrenz recounts the formation of TIES, Total Information for Educational Systems, and his move to Honeywell to assist them in developing instructional time-sharing….
• MECC Relocation
  The MECC relocation from “The Old Building” to the new location at 1660 Summit Drive North in Brooklyn Center is today. Room locations for the New Building include the following: Meeting rooms: Home Room, Club Room, and Muncher Hall on 1st floor; West Conference Room and Hide-A-Way on 2nd; Transformation Cell and Technical Circles on 3rd; Oval Office and Think Tank on 5th. Common Areas: TLC (Total Life Concept, health and wellness) Workout Room, TLC Library in Muncher Hall, and Sick Bay and Showers on 1st; Software Library on 2nd.
• Meeting Room Names Vote
  For those employees who voted on names for the meeting rooms on their floors, the names will be decided prior to the move. All employees got to vote on the following rooms and subsequent names of said rooms: The lunchroom (Destiny Dining, The Bleachers, Ten-Forward, Munch Room, Muncher Hall) The lunchroom annex (Club Room, Farm Room, Crayon West, Troggle Trough) The conference room (Vision Room, Home Room, Minnesota Room, Oregon Trail). The names for will be announced prior to the relocation.
• The Oregon Trail 2nd Generation
  Kids Challenge the American Frontierwith The Oregon Trail® The Oregon Trail Music Clip (au 8kHz 198 KB) Danger. Disease. Death!Students must conquer these and other perils as they travel the treacherous trail across the unpredictable American frontier. And each sensational version of MECC’s blockbuster classroom hit, The Oregon Trail, adds an exciting twist to the trail! Kids ford treacherous rivers. They face dangerous weather. They live off the land. Their quest? To start new lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley – and to learn about U.S. history and geography, too. This historical adventure simulation has already sold more than a million…
• MECC. Not Just Your Ordinary Software Company
  From the 1986 MECC Educational Computing Catalog What makes MECC different? That’s easy. MECC was the first educational software company. And that means experience in designing and providing more educational software for more students than any of ourcompetitors. Of course, in the past thirteen years, educational computing has evolved and grown a great deal. But so has MECC. We’ve learned, adapted, and kept UP. with the latest trends and technological advances. So what was true thirteen years ago is still true today: MECC Is the leader in educational computing. But experience isn’t the only thing that makes MECC special. There’s also MECC’s unique commitment. MECC is totally dedicated to service. Our objective is to serve the educational community. This catalog presents over 300 educational software products designed with you in mind. Here you’ll find courseware, teaching tools, planning guides, training materials, and administrative packages, all with the same important goal: to make teaching and learning easy, pleasant,…
• Reflections on Educational Computing
  Kenneth BrumbaughCreative Computing MagazineNovember 1984 – PP.170,173  About the Author Kenneth Brumbaugh is executive director of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), one of the oldest and largest educational computer using groups in the world. Brumbaugh has a doctorate in science education from Wayne State University, Michigan and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He was a science education instructor at Wayne State and an instructor of physical science at Towson State College in Maryland. He established MECC institutional memberships and the User Services Team. Brumbaugh was responsible for MECC/Apple II and Atari volume purchase contracts. He was…
• MECC Becomes a Public Corporation
  From https://www.revisor.mn.gov/laws/1984/0/Session+Law/chapter/619/ Laws of Minnesota 1984 CHAPTER 619-S.F.No. 1736 An act relating to education; creating the Minnesota educational computing corporation as a public corporation; transferring assets of the Minnesota educational computing consortium to the corporation; amending Minnesota Statutes 1983 Supplement, section 3.732, subdivision 1; 10A.01, subdivision 18; 15A.081, subdivision 1; 135A.07, subdivision 2; 352D.02, subdivision 1; and proposing new law coded as Minnesota Statutes, chapter 119; repealing Minnesota Statutes 1982, section 120.83; Minnesota Statutes 1983 Supplement, sections 120.801; 120.802; 120.803; 120.804; 120.805; 120.806; and 120.81. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA: Section 1. [119.01] [MINNESOTA…
• MECC Highlighted in Episode of Bits and Bytes
  The TV Ontario program, Bits and Bytes has highlighted the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and our product creation process. The TVO episode, the second in the Bits and Bytes run, includes appearances by CEO Ken Brumbaugh as well as a younger version of Phillip Bouchard. Bits and Bytes is a TV program is directed Stuart Beecroft and stars Luba Goy and Billy Van covering a variety of aspects of the Computing industry. Their primary focus is displaying to those at home, how a computer actually works. You can find the entire twelve episode run of the TVO program here:https://www.youtube.com/user/bitsandbytestvo