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MECC
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC, was an organization founded in 1971 best known for developing the edutainment video game series '' The Oregon Trail'' and its spinoffs. The goal of the organization was to coordinate and provide computer services to schools in the state of Minnesota; however, its software eventually became popular in schools around the world.and Canada. MECC had its headquarters in the Brookdale Corporate Center in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. It was acquired by SoftKey in 1995 and was shut down in 1999. History Origins During the 1960s, Minnesota was a center of computer technology, what '' City Pages'' would describe 50 years later as a "Midwestern Silicon Valley". IBM, Honeywell, Control Data and other companies had facilities in the state. In 1963, their presence inspired a group of teachers at the University of Minnesota College of Education's laboratory school to introduce computers into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MECC Circular Minnesota Logo
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC, was an organization founded in 1971 best known for developing the edutainment video game series ''The Oregon Trail (series), The Oregon Trail'' and its spinoffs. The goal of the organization was to coordinate and provide computer services to schools in the state of Minnesota; however, its software eventually became popular in schools around the world.and Canada. MECC had its headquarters in the Brookdale Corporate Center in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. It was acquired by SoftKey in 1995 and was shut down in 1999. History Origins During the 1960s, Minnesota was a center of computer technology, what ''City Pages'' would describe 50 years later as a "Midwestern Silicon Valley". IBM, Honeywell, Control Data and other companies had facilities in the state. In 1963, their presence inspired a group of teachers at the University of Minnesota University of Mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Oregon Trail (series)
''The Oregon Trail'' is a series of educational computer games. The first game was originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach 8th grade schoolchildren about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848. History In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on a HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help. The original core gameplay concepts that have been included in every subsequent vers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SoftKey
SoftKey International (originally SoftKey Software Products, Inc.) was a software company founded by Kevin O'Leary in 1986 in Toronto, Ontario. It was known as The Learning Company from 1995 to 1999 after acquiring The Learning Company and taking its name. SoftKey played a major role in the dissolution of the edutainment industry by the turn of the millennium. Contributing factors include its reduction of the market price by releasing shovelware discs of freeware and shareware, hostile takeovers of major edutainment software companies, reduction of these acquisitions to a skeleton staff, and questionable financial practices to maintain its stock price. In 1999, the company was acquired by Mattel in what ''Businessweek'' called one of "the Worst Deals of All Time". It was subsequently folded into Mattel Interactive. Products SoftKey published and distributed CD-ROM-based personal computer software for Windows and Macintosh computers during the late 1980s and 1990s. Its li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brooklyn Center, Minnesota
Brooklyn Center is a first-ring suburban city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area. In 1911, the area became a village formed from parts of Brooklyn Township and Crystal Lake Township. In 1966, Brooklyn Center became a charter city. The city has commercial and industrial development. The majority of land use is single-family homes. The population was 33,782 at the 2020 census, and the city has become the most ethnically diverse community in the state. History Pioneers organized town governments for Brooklyn Township and Crystal Lake Township when Minnesota became a state in 1858. Osseo Road was a main thoroughfare that brought settlers to an area centered around their school, post office, store, meeting hall, and Baptist and Methodist churches. That location thrived as a market gardening community. It abutted the encroaching development of Minneapolis to the south. Steps were taken to protect the area from annexation b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HP 2000
The HP 2100 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers that were produced by Hewlett-Packard (HP) from the mid-1960s to early 1990s. Tens of thousands of machines in the series were sold over its twenty-five year lifetime, making HP the fourth largest minicomputer vendor during the 1970s. The design started at Data Systems Inc (DSI), and was originally known as the DSI-1000. HP purchased the company in 1964 and merged it into their Dymec division. The original model, the 2116A built using integrated circuits and magnetic-core memory, was released in 1966. Over the next four years, models A through C were released with different types of memory and expansion, as well as the cost-reduced 2115 and 2114 models. All of these models were replaced by the HP 2100 series in 1971, and then again as the 21MX series in 1974 when the magnetic-core memory was replaced with semiconductor memory. All of these models were also packaged as the HP 2000 series, combining a 2100-series machine with opti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Educational Software
Educational software is a term used for any computer software which is made for an educational purpose. It encompasses different ranges from language learning software to classroom management software to reference software. The purpose of all this software is to make some part of education more effective and efficient. History 1946s–1970s The use of computer hardware and software in education and training dates to the early 1940s, when American researchers developed flight simulators which used analog computers to generate simulated onboard instrument data. One such system was the type19 synthetic radar trainer, built in 1943. From these early attempts in the WWII era through the mid-1970s, educational software was directly tied to the hardware, on which it ran. Pioneering educational computer systems in this era included the PLATO system (1960), developed at the University of Illinois, and TICCIT (1969). In 1963, IBM had established a partnership with Stanford University's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minneapolis Public Schools
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) or Special School District Number 1 is a public school district serving students in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis Public Schools enrolls 36,370 students in public primary and secondary schools. The district administers about one hundred public schools including forty-five elementary schools, seven middle schools, seven high schools, eight special education schools, eight alternative schools, nineteen contract alternative schools, and five charter schools. With authority granted by the state legislature, the school board makes policy, selects the superintendent, and oversees the district's budget, curriculum, personnel, and facilities. Students speak ninety different languages at home and most school communications are printed in English, Hmong, Spanish, and Somali. Enrollment In the past decade enrollment in Minneapolis Public Schools has decreased significantly. In the 2001-2002 school year th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Minnesota State University, Mankato (MNSU, MSU, or Minnesota State) is a public university in Mankato, Minnesota, United States. It is Minnesota's second-largest university and has over 123,000 living alumni worldwide. Founded in 1868, it is the second-oldest member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, and is commonly referred to as the flagship institution. It was established as the Second State Normal School in 1858 and officially opened as Mankato Normal School a decade later. Minnesota State University, Mankato is a significant contributor to the local and state economies, adding over $781 million to the Minnesota economy annually. Across seven colleges and schools, Minnesota State offers over 130 undergraduate programs of study, over 85 graduate programs, and 4 doctoral programs. It hosts the only nationally, regionally, and state accredited aviation program in Minnesota. Students are served by 750 full-time faculty members, creating a 21:1 student to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John George Kemeny
John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz and Mary Kenneth Keller. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians. Early life Born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family, Kemeny attended the Rácz private primary school in Budapest and was a classmate of Nándor Balázs. In 1938 his father left for the United States alone. In 1940, he took the whole Kemeny family to the United States when the adoption of the second anti-Jewish law in Hungary became imminent. His grandfather, however, refused to leave and was murdered in the Holocaust ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
School Boards
A board of education, school committee or school board is the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or an equivalent institution. The elected council determines the educational policy in a small regional area, such as a city, county, state, or province. Frequently, a board of directors power with a larger institution, such as a higher government's department of education. The name of such board is also often used to refer to the school system under such board's control. The government department that administered education in the United Kingdom before the foundation of the Ministry of Education was formerly called the Board of Education A board of education, school committee or school board is the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or an equivalent institution. The elected council determines the educational policy in a small regional are .... See also * National Association of State Boards of Ed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joint Powers Authority
A joint powers authority (JPA) is an entity permitted under the laws of some U.S. states, whereby two or more public authorities (e.g. local governments, or utility or transport districts), not necessarily located in the same state, may jointly exercise any power common to all of them. Joint powers authorities may be used where: *an activity naturally transcends the boundaries of existing public authorities. An example would be the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, set up to promote the construction of a new transit center in San Francisco, with several transportation boards and counties around the San Francisco Bay Area as members; *by combining their commercial efforts, public authorities can achieve economies of scale or market power. An example is National IPA, a purchasing consortium of local government and education agencies, also known as cooperative purchasing. Joint powers authorities are particularly widely used in California (where they are permitted under Section 650 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
