As techy types they probably had futuristic means of communication using a powerful computer and a phone line. The fact that my teacher lived in Portsmouth, England and Will Wright lived in America isn't relevant. Now, whilst he wasn't the Mr Wright, I have my suspicions they were related. Mr Wright, my teacher, obviously saw something there.
It was a terrible, unwieldy thing - but incredibly I got an A for it. Written in BASIC, you could move around the screen with the cursor keys and place a section of road with the 'R' key or a house by pressing 'H'. I programmed a little utility on the BBC Micro called, rather inspirationally, Housing Estate Planner. Back In 1987 was working on my GCSE Computer Studies project.
