Yeah, my experience was from the UK between like 2002 and 2007.

Speaking with my younger cousins it seems nowadays they have the opportunity to learn actual programming and so on.

We just got Doom (the 1995 one) and Street Fighter 2 to work via LAN and played that during the class, one person would do the actual work each lesson so we still had something to hand in.

Getting the LAN to work wasn't easy so I suppose it taught me that!