Edited sentence: If not for Oregon Trail, some students of relatively narrow horizon may never have learned the verb 'ford.Its pedagogic value lay mainly in introducing to children various proper nouns, such as names of diseases, forts, crucial parts of wagons, and first names no longer in wide use.More interesting is its implicit metagame, called Swindle, in which shrewd computer programmers convince gullible suburban school admistrators to spend copious discretionary funds on so-called edutainment software, which eschews the violence of the typical videogame in favor of tempting the young player through a series of tediously predictably menu screens by the promise of periodic episodes of shooting dead as many animals as possible.The game is most notable for not teaching anything about frontier life that a rather stupid child couldn't have figured out purely by means of common sense, while simultaneously ranking little beyond pounding the 'equals' button on a calculator in terms of schooltime entertainment