power PC software recommends using Rosetta

Support for Rosetta was dropped years ago. The last OS that supported it was 10.6. There isn't a way of making it work unless you install Snow Leopard (10.6) back onto your Mac.

Two workarounds:

1) Partition your hard drive or add an external hard drive and install Snow Leopard (with the OPTION of Rosetta selected) into the new partition or external hard drive. Use the "Dual-Boot" method to restart your Mac (Option-Restart) and select which flavor of OS X to boot into (Snow Leopard or Yosemite). Boot into Snow Leopard when you want to run your educational DVD.

2) In Yosemite, install Snow Leopard Server into Parallels 10 and run your educational DVD in Yosemite, as shown below:

[click on image to enlarge]

Snow Leopard Server $20 - 1.800.MYAPPLE (1.800.692.7753) - Apple Part Number: MC588Z/A (telephone orders only). If they claim they do not have it ask to speak to someone else or call back.

Parallels $79 retail; 14 day free trial:

http://trial.parallels.com/

Installing Snow Leopard Server into Parallels 10 for DUMMIES:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=17285039&postcount=564

You may also want to look in the folders on the DVD.

It may have additional info in a ReadMe or 'installation notes' that explains where the content is stored, or it may have an index.html or index.htm file that opens in a browser.

Sometimes older apps stored the files in formats so that Windows & PC users got the same content, but the launchers that opened the content that are now out of date.

My experience in helping students with educational DVDs on their modern day Macbooks is that these DVDs typically have a PowerPC application that must be used to reference and/or search for the needed narrative.

So while your suggest seems plausible and is certainly worth a try, I doubt that the OP will have any success using your suggestion.

I am glad you had a reasonbly quick fix for your situation.

I have much experience with helping those Mac users who have the problem of using PowerPC applications in a modern Mac world, especially those who are "orphaned" by software publishers who, for one or more reasons, cannot or will not upgrade their software to work natively on an Intel Mac.

Many of these users are college students who discovered, like you, that the educational DVD that was supplied with their college textbook just will not run on their recently purchased MacBook. Given the government cutbacks of education in the last two decades, it is understandable why textbook publishers, such as Pearson, do not have the economic reason to fund the upgrade of their DVD library.

My suggested method offers them the ability to run their PowerPC DVD on their modern MacBook, rather than the alternative: not keep pace with other students in their class who are able to run the DVD because of owning a Windows computer or other reason.

Any port in a Rosetta storm! 🙂