We had The Oregon Trail as part of teaching materials in our school in the 1980s.
In the UK.
Most of us in my class didn't know where Oregon is, really did not care about a story of woefully unprepared people who chose to make a journey for reasons of absolutely no consequence to a British nine year old, and to this day likely bear a grudge against an entire US state.
I got into an awful lot of trouble for submitting the minimum possible homework on that. Other kids: fifteen pages of detailed drawings and stories. Me: two A5 sides of completely disinterested made-up diary.
We played Oregon Trail as part of school here in the US, and probably had a similar sense of US geography at the time, but we were just happy to get to use the computers.
I didn't say anything about a Mac. Though I accept I am taking it way off topic with my little grumble. Really I'm just still smarting at being told off :-)
It absolutely wouldn't have been an Apple II; I never saw an Apple II in the UK until they were retro. It would have been a port to the (similarly 6502-based) BBC Model B. We had loads of those in schools [0].
A bit of a google suggests that it was likely based on code from a 1978 computer listing, though it would have been 1983 when it was inflicted on us.
Funnily enough I don't think we spent more than half an hour with the computer. A week or so with the assignment.
[0] the Apple II would have been more expensive, and didn't provide the opportunity for schools-television-related content or a loan of the county's (truly groundbreaking) Domesday Book laser disk system:
> You may be misrembering - a Mac would be very rare in a UK school - it was probably an Apple II.
Getting even more off-topic, but I remember being a kid/teen in 1980s/90s Australia, and the diversity of machines we got to use at school impresses me in hindsight: Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, classic Macs, Acorn Archimedes, IBM PC JXs running DOS, Atari STs, no-name IBM PC compatibles running Windows 3.x/9x and Netware. (Not all at the same school, that was across four different schools I attended K-12.) My own kids don’t get exposed to anywhere near as much technological variety.
I went to a .. I want to say not very affluent school in Scotland, but that'd be an understatement. But we were taught to type on classic macs. I don't remember exactly what model, but definitely these ones with the little offset grin.
All I really remember is a shufflepuck game. That's it.
Just to confuse things, this would have been about 1995. That awkward gap between the beebs, and Tesco taking an interest in the matter.
We had a room of BBC Micros, a room of RM Nimbuses, and a room of Macs at school (UK). The Macs were evidently the coolest. Pretty much the first thing I did when I got to university was buy a IIsi (funded by the articles I was writing for an 8-bit magazine).
In the UK.
Most of us in my class didn't know where Oregon is, really did not care about a story of woefully unprepared people who chose to make a journey for reasons of absolutely no consequence to a British nine year old, and to this day likely bear a grudge against an entire US state.
I got into an awful lot of trouble for submitting the minimum possible homework on that. Other kids: fifteen pages of detailed drawings and stories. Me: two A5 sides of completely disinterested made-up diary.
It was my only real rebellion.