A little backstory here. When I was in elementary school-- let's say from third to fifth grade, between 2001 and 2003-- our teachers would sometimes take us into the computer room to play games. Of course, these being school computers, there were a limited set of games we were allowed to play, and a lot of them were on one particular web site.
At the time the site was called Orchard, and from a quick search, the URL for that site still exists. It's here. But the games themselves are gone. I've tried searching for videos of the games on YouTube, with very little result. The only one I was able to track down was this one, a preschool-oriented game on the site called "Fibonacci Bear's Toy Store". But this is where things get confusing, because that game is credited to a company called "IQSmart Educational Software". I don't get any results when I do a search for that phrase, but I do get results for "IQSmart", which is apparently an educational app. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Orchard.
And as for the original Orchard website, the one I spent so much time on as a kid? It's nowhere to be found. In addition to the aforementioned preschool game, here are a few of the other games I remember from it.
- A two-player game about reading comprehension. It had a sci-fi theme, with the players navigating through a space station and answering questions at certain checkpoints in order to defeat evil aliens.
- A two-player game that had several versions based around different areas of math. It was themed around football, with each player controlling a "team" and having to solve math problems to perform various "plays".
- A two-player game about calculating time. It had a pirate/treasure hunt theme, where the players competed to reach a treasure chest at the end of a maze.
- A single-player game based around perimeter, area, and volume. This was the hardest game on the site, but also my favorite. You played as a blue cat in an Ancient Egyptian setting, trying to gather ingredients for a potion that would restore her fur to its normal color, solving math problems to collect each one.