Goldfields is a computer game for children which simulates 'life on the diggings' during a 19th-century gold rush. Beginning with a concept by Trevor Jacob, it was developed and published by Jacaranda Software in Australia in 1986. It was first released for Apple II,

BBC Micro The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphas ...

, Commodore 64 and IBM compatible systems. The first

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

version was later developed using

Hypercard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

. The original ''Goldfields'' package contained a disk, teacher's guide, four black-line masters and a copy of ''A Goldfields Journal'' or ''A Guide to Prospective Gold Seekers''. A review in ''Australian Educational Computing'' magazine described it as 'a particularly useful package, adaptable to a number of levels in both upper primary and secondary social science classes.' The game also received a favourable review from the ''Australian Journal of Reading'' in 1986. Despite its age, ''Goldfields'' remains well regarded as a mining-themed economic simulator with integrated action sequences. Due to its ongoing popularity with children and educators, it was rewritten from scratch for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

XP and

OSX by Greygum Software in 2007,{{Cite web, url = http://www.greygum.com.au/nebula/, title = Greygum Software, date = 2007-01-22, access-date = 2015-01-27, website = Greygum Software who bought the rights to the title after Jacaranda Software's closure in the early 1990s.

References

Simulation video games Educational games