If you're homeschooling a student, you're probably also using a home computer. Interactive games can be a fun way to enhance your lesson plans - or an educational way for your student to take a break. Either way, there's several good educational games that teach lessons about history. And best of all, they're free!
Oregon Trail is one of the oldest educational games, and it's still fondly remembered by students from the 1980s and 1990s. (The original game was designed in 1971, and it gained a new popularity when computers first began appearing in classrooms.) It challenges players to make wise choices about what to take on a cross-country trip to the farmlands out west. (Should you buy extra bullets to shoot buffalo for trading - or just stock up on food before you go?) There's a good chance some members of your party will die of fever, but that's ultimately one of its most accurate details. Transcontinental migration was a rough and difficult, and without the advantages of modern medicine and civilization, many pioneers still died along the way.
Of course, students can always learn a lot about history by touring the virtual history exhibits in Second Life. For example, the Jewish Historical Museum has an exhibit about the holocaust, which one reviewer described as "very reminiscent of a traditional museum, with displays and text about them to read." There's always new exhibits coming online in Second Life, so check around for something that matches your lesson plan. The walk-through exhibits offer fully-interactive virtual words, so they're basically on the cutting edge of today's interactive games.
1917 is another very simple web-based game that still has a lesson to teach about history. It recreates the futile trench warfare between German and British soldiers during the final years of World War I, letting players decide whether to huddle defensively or to launch an assault. It looks like a miserable life - soldiers basically either die from gas attacks, or they get gunned down trying to storm the opposing trenches. But again, that's actually a historically accurate portrayal of the misery that was World War I.
This game was followed by a more complicated sequel called 1944. (A good question might be to ask your student why the game designer chose these particular years - the obvious answer, in both cases, being that it was the year before the year that the wars ended.) Comparing the two games shows that warfare changed over the intervening years - for example, in the game "1944" there's now airplanes flying over to strafe the opposing soldiers. And instead of abandoned trenches, much of the fighting takes place in abandoned cities, as the German troops storm their way across the French countryside.
They're educational, they're interactive, they're free, and they're useful. But best of all, with some careful attention, you can use all of these games to reinforce some very important lessons about history.