A strange little side quest
One reason learning games keeps producing good game ideas around My Colorful Mandala is that its history is full of strange turns. The Oregon Trail began in 1971 when three student teachers created a computer simulation to help Minnesota schoolchildren learn American history. That old idea kept changing rather than disappearing. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. That long chain of experiments is part of why learning games still feels fresh when a game finds the right twist.
