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 Jacaranda Software was an Australian developer and publisher of educational computer games for children. It was based in Brisbane, Australia and published under the leadership of John Collins. The team worked as a department of Jacaranda-Wiley; th ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

in 1986. It was first released for

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

, BBC Micro,

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

and IBM compatible systems. The first Macintosh version was later developed using Hypercard. 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 XP and Macintosh 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