Off the top of my head here's a few games I remember playing in grade school.
**Kid Pix** - not really a 'game' but we played it like it was. I think we played the Apple version? Just recently Vikrum Nijjar ported it to Javascript and HTML so you can play it in browser! https://kidpix.app/
One of the computers I do remember specifically was the [ICON](https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971).
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/h5w2c7b.jpeg]
Designed by Cemcorp, the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation for Canadian schools. I would have used it in the mid-late 90s when it would have been incredibly out of date. Some of the games for it were:
- Lemonade Stand - https://archive.org/details/a2_Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple
- Cross Country Canada https://archive.org/details/msdos_Crosscountry_Canada_1991
- Number Munchers https://archive.org/details/Number_Munchers_v1.2_1986_MECC
I'm sure all of us being of various ages and backgrounds will have some very different answers to the question, so really interested to see what comes up :)
Almost feels obligatory to mention Oregon Trail, but seconding Number Munchers.
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/yarLuHy.png]
Outdated as hell at the time like you mentioned (since I'm sure I would've been playing Genesis/SNES at this point) but there was still a thrill in just, playing a video game in a classroom.
Also, we had the "Gifted and Talented" program which outside of basically being the Quiz Bowl team, pretty much just amounted to playing Carmen Sandiego instead of, i dunno, Spelling Class.
I‘m young enough that when I was in school, people were making quite competent games in flash and uploading them on websites like Newgrounds, addicting games, armor games, etc…. the two that come to mind as classroom favorites (at least for me - at that point there were so many games on so many websites it’d be hard to find any kind of real consensus) are The Fancy Pants Adventure and The Impossible Quiz!
Local shared drive with SNES / GBA emulators that none of the IT staff caught onto, until someone was caught at secondary. I grew up in the 00s so it was all either that or Runescape in my age bracket. Once I got to sixth form we started using USB sticks to play a slimmed down version of Quake 3 I cobbled together for people.
Forgot how big Runescape was for UK kids tbh.
Oh one group was real into Gunbound, I don't remember that as well though...
TI 84 games were all the rage when I was in school. Some favorites I remember:
IndestructoTank, a port of a flash game, had you trying to get hit by enemy ships so you could bounce on them. Every minute or so you'd enter a shop and buy more enemy ships. Still one of my favorite coffeebreak games
https://youtu.be/gDK7LHTy5IA
Block Dude, a port of a DOS game called Block Man was a great puzzle game
https://youtu.be/NGmQaTBf5Ls
And then of course "Doom" which was a Wolfenstein 3d port that barely ran
https://youtu.be/nduMTX86Zl0
In primary school we had an Apple II/e per classroom. I remember playing quite a bit of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, I remember booting up Logo and just making that turtle go about a million units on some angle so it would wrap around the screen and fill the area with as much solid colour as I could.
There was some other quest/rpg type game that I cannot remember the name of, nor much detail. I want to say it had something to do with a crystal, or had the world "crystal" somewhere in the title... but that may well be a false memory by this point. There was some other game where you had to incubate dragon eggs.
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While I was going through highschool, my school was getting computer rooms set up and networked. We played a lot of Doom, a lot of Falcon 3.0, and a lot of Scorched Earth. Scorch was great because you could set up 10 players and have a huge game.
I was playing a lot of _other_ games at the time, but those were the ones that we played _at_ school, and were largely accepted as things we could and would play at the end of class or if we finished our stuff early, etc.
I played Pokemon Crystal to completion in my desk on a GBA SP in 6th grade. That year, our computer lab had a bundle of old Arcade games on it and I played a ton of DigDug.
In high school, between a hacked PSP and some early smartphones, I always had a portable emulation machine on me at all times. I played a lot of SNES games that way. The Palm Centro’s keyboard was a terrible input device but 15-16 year old me was more excited about the possibility of playing “real” games on my phone.
In high school my friend found a Gameboy emulator which could be loaded onto our feature phones, smart phones were already common place (iphone 5 was out iirc) but we didn't have any money. We played through a lot of Pokemon Crystal, Super Mario Land, and a few other games. On my phone, a Nokia C2-01, I also bought a worms game which supported multiplayer and EDGE Extended which only sometimes lagged.
I'm looking at mobygames and I think my nokia must of supported J2ME to run all these games.
Edit - I think the emulator was [MeBoy](http://www.arktos.se/meboy/)
The talk of emulators got me thinking about how in high school, one of my friends brought in a Neo Geo emulator (Kawaks) on a usb stick and played off that.
Heck yeah to TI-83 games. That's actually where I made my first game, a re-skin of Drug Wars that was about skateboarding and make skate videos.
I was in high school right when online multiplayer games were becoming a thing, so we spent lots of computer lab playing whatever free Flash games we could get our hands on.
First off we have Avalanche, a great multiplayer Tetris clone where you could send bad blocks to other players. Doesn't seem like a ton of people remember it, as these were the only images I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20010331040159im_/http://www.centerfleet.com/applet/images/games/avalanche/avalanche_small_rounded_preview.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20010405070101im_/http://www.centerfleet.com/applet/images/mission/puzzlemissions/avalanche/avalanchePreview.gif
We also played a ton of ARC (Attack Retrieve Capture) which was a rad, top-down capture thee flag game with spaceships: https://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/5634/popcap_arc.jpg
But honestly the game I probably spent the most time on was Utopia, a text based kingdom building game: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/screen/full/8/5/0/231850.jpg
My #1 classroom diversion was WarCraft II on my archaic laptop, which I played often while my middle school science teacher (a character) got distracted on long, long tangents about his favorite topics, including but not limited to nature’s most revolting parasites, the Dune saga, and the moral decadence of modern society.
At school? I’ll snitch every single one of you to the head teacher.
I am probably just a little too old for this thread, since feature phones started becoming a thing (for kids) around high school and the most advanced mobile game back then was Nokia’s Snake.
My strongest memory of playing video games inside a school was in primary school with the sudden and short-lived boom of Game & Watch games brought over and played at recess, when I was around five years old. Mainly Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr and Oil Panic. Pretty much my introduction to video games. I might have also discovered Zelda on the Game & Watch before I played the NES version. I mainly remember this craze as an unexpected form of social progress within the school’s walls because Donkey Kong made all of us awful little boys too busy with high scores to continue harassing the little girls.
Much later, I have a vague recollection of discovering and playing the first Civ in black and white on a computer installed in a specific classroom, around what Americans would consider sixth or seventh grade, but that specific computer wasn’t easily accessible so I probably only played it once or twice.
I think one of my nerdier friends in middle-school had a Wizardry clone and a Tetris clone on his graphics-capable TI calculator, but most of us were still on basic-ass one line LCD screen Casio calculators. And it would have been hard (and not worth the risk) to play a Game Boy, Game Gear or Atari Lynx in class. These original handhelds were thick.
Things must be have been crazy for the next generation of kids with the avent of smartphones and Internet being accessible from anywhere. Our text messages were hastily folded paper notes haphazardly thrown in a friend’s general direction while the teacher wasn’t looking.
My first real experience with games at school was installing Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on the school computers. We had computers but no IT to speak of in elementary school, just our typing teacher who didn‘t really get computers beyond his one use for them. So we didn’t have any firewalls or blockers or anything. Just brought in a disc, installed it, and played during class. It got passed around as well so most kids in those classes got to play it.
In primary school along with the scholastic book orders there were a few edu games that also ended up in our classrooms. The main games were Numbers Up: Volcanic Panic and it's more exciting sequel, Numbers Up: Baggin the Dragon. These were board game like games where you went around solving math questions. The first taking place on a volcanic island and the second in a medieval castle.
However there were a few computers that had other non-edu games installed too. The holy chalice being the Mac in Room 9 (year 3 & 4 class) which had a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game. A few kids would get to school early so they could be the one to claim this computer before school started at 9am.
Another game which was more popular in years 5 and 6 was [Marble Blast Gold](https://www.mobygames.com/game/marble-blast-gold). This was installed on the Macs outside Rooms 10 and 11. I liked this game so much that I had the demo installed on the family PC at home. This game is level based and records the top 10 fastest times for each level. This meant there was a somewhat competitive scene of 10 year old marble blast players in our school.
I‘m still not sure why my primary and intermediate school only had Macs, there must have been some deal with apple. Everyone I knew as a kid had a PC as a family computer. It’s possibly why I was never confident with computers until high school.
@beets All the schools I went to in the 90s also only had Macs. It was funny cause I was pretty proficient with our family Windows PC at home, but totally lost on the Macs at school.
I do remember in middle school (ca 1999-2002), our computer lab got those swanky iMacs with the clear bubble cases and it felt like the future had arrived in an instant. Those things were pretty cool.
People already mentioned all the staples, but the game my friends and I would play during high school was [OGame](https://lobby.ogame.gameforge.com/en_GB/hub), which surprisingly enough is still up and running, looks and play almost exactly the same, and I still find myself popping back into it every once in a while (purely coincidental with this thread, I've been playing it again within the last few weeks). Browser based space resource/warfare sim. Pretty fun to have on in another tab while I'm doing work from home (or from work loooool).
This was happening well in to university for me, and nobody had a phone anyway. People used to make fun of anyone that had a mobile phone! “What do you need a phone for? Are you some kind of yuppie?”
My primary school (grades 1-6, or around ages 5-10) had one Apple II/e per classroom (in a separate side-room) that students in pairs had 30 minutes (I don‘t think it was a full hour but I can’t quite recall clearly) per week scheduled that they were allowed to use and do things on.
Highschool (grades 7-12, or ages around 10 or 11 to around 16 or 17) had two special rooms with computers in them. One of them I can‘t even remember what the hardware was, I think they were IBM Compatible XTs but I’m not sure. I remember them all having a monochrome green screen, and they were only used for the typing class. The other room was more modern and had 386s and was used for “IT” class, which ranged from “teach students how to use word processing software and make text bold” through to very simple programming classes. We were allowed to play games on those computers in the last few minutes of that class if we'd finished our work ahead of time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010331040159im_/http://www.centerfleet.com/applet/images/games/avalanche/avalanche_small_rounded_preview.gif 
https://web.archive.org/web/20010405070101im_/http://www.centerfleet.com/applet/images/mission/puzzlemissions/avalanche/avalanchePreview.gif
https://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/5634/popcap_arc.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/screen/full/8/5/0/231850.jpg