Kurt Squire first recognized the learning potential of games in 1987 in his history class in high school. When his teacher asked the students if they knew the differences between English and Spanish colonization strategies in the Caribbean, he was the only one who knew the answer (the Spanish sailed galleons and held forts across the Caribbean for transporting gold, while the English sought to establish permanent settlements). But Squire hadn’t been reading ahead in the textbook: He had inadvertently learned the history of Caribbean colonization from spending countless hours playing a video game called Sid Meier’s Pirates! on his Commodore 64 computer.
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