G-rated Simulation Games?

jhl at school asks: "I am a Math and Technology teacher at a middle school, in rural Maine, where all of our 7th and 8th graders are given iBooks that they can use. What they are allowed to do with them is kept within strict limits, and it must be educational. I stay with then after school, and during this time they are allowed to use them for fun -- within limits (no violence, and nothing sexually explicit). I bought a copy of 'The Sims', at the kids' request, but the principal says it's too racy (polygamy is allowed, characters can climb into bed together, and so forth). What simulations our out there, where these kids can play in virtual environment, but keep it G-rated as my principal would like. Alternately, might there be some information to help the argument that 'The Sims' has educational value? I've found nothing I thought was objectionable - but this is a very conservative community. Thanks on behalf of my kids, who could use a little fun."

Comments

tranquility

[presearch]

We've got just the game you're looking for: tranquility.

It's totally abstract, non-violent and highly mathematical. We have several schools that play tranquility
as a group activity. Download the game and give it a try, then drop us a note on our site support form and
we'll set you up with free accounts.

You know, for kids!!

Re:tranquility

[presearch]

But...it's -supposed- to be boring and banal.
Finding a random object in boring nothingness is exactly the point.

My goal was to have the player burn as little brain power as possible:
No puzzles, no path memory, small, nearly imperceptable differences in a self-similar world.
That's also why the controls work like they do, you can only play by the smallest movements,
to the point of being catatonic and mentally shifted into neutral. 1 part mescaline, 3 parts quaalude.

It's done it's thing on you, whether you realize it or not. It acts as a type-A personality filter.
That's why you have a strong reaction against something you say is essentially nothing.
It can't make you tranquil, but you have to force yourself to be tranquil to make it work.

I enjoy a deep FPS as much as the next guy, and I've never found tetris to be especially
exciting, despite it's popularity. We fill a niche, for a very elite clientele. And at ten bucks a
pop, what's the problem? Some get it, the rest miss out. No big deal.

As I know everyone will say Roller-Coaster Tycoon

[KNicolson]

I'd vote for Transport Tycoon. The lower skill levels are very weak AI (can you set the number of CPU opponents to zero?) but the integrated traffic management skills are still needed even there. It's perhaps just a little slow-paced, especially at the beginning, so takes a while to get to an "interesting" point, although you could always give them a saved game you prepared earlier.

Railroad Tycoon II has pre-set scenarios and perhaps looks better than TT, but I never got into that game quite so much.

Oh, if the Sims is too racy, good old SimCity might be OK - ISTR that there is specific educational information available for it.

Sim Tower

[justanyone]

Sim Tower is kind of old but it's very good.

You optimize a building. you can put a hotel, restaurants, shopping mall, movie theater, subway stop, elevators, condos etc in and you get revenue streams from it. it's great for seeing who can make the most money and why. Of course, this is for bigger kids (2nd grade minimum, probably 4th grade is better).

The other one is Sim Safari, which optimizes a game reserve. you can put in a variety of animals, but you need to buy services of a game specialist, guide, build a hut, hire drivers, etc. The fun part is that you get to learn what animals can live together (it's designed to be very educational without being too in-your-face about it).

I liked it, too, but I liked sim tower more.

Sim city was pretty good. My dad was a city manager and he loved the idea of it because it simulated all the strange things that could happen in municipal planning. Of course, Godzilla walking thru town is possible in the game but not real life, but even in the game it is rare. Most of the problems are bad street design, lack of firefighters, etc.

The interrelatedness of things is a big thing to teach. The fact that any large system involving many competing interests has multiple solutions, and sometimes the fact that people disagree or that they don't work perfectly is normal.

Lots of uneducated people all around the world (not just in the U.S.) think that there are simple solutions to the world's problems, and the Sim games show that this isn't true and, intuitively, why not.

A few suggestions

[0x0d0a]

Note that I'm not considering OS in this. These are general suggestions.

* Anything in the "programming game" genre. When doing this, a player designs a robot to go through some kind of puzzle or challenge (or theoretically fight, though as much of this is rather abstract, it may work under your violence issues). The original game in this genre is "Core Wars" (despite the name, if you consider this violent, I will be impressed), where little bits of code struggled desperately to try to control more memory. There are other games in this genre, like "Mindrover". I found a quick list of games in the genre here

* There are a number of simulation games that would work. Most games in the sim genre really *are* okay. The SimCities have been in the educational market forever for a good reason (makes me realize how dated my educational software knowledge is, though). For Linux, Lincity is good -- plays quite different from SimCity, with distribution of goods and power more of an emphasis than utilitiy coverage.

* Many puzzle games can be considered educational. Go to Info-Mac or another Mac software site and look under "Puzzle". I'm personally rather fond of sobokan and clones, where one pushes boxes around in a "warehouse" into proper locations. It's untimed, but fun.

* The Simple End User Linux (SEUL) project maintains a lot of links to software (including educational software) for Linux. Open source software has a way of getting ported, and I suspect you'll find that a fair amount works on OS X. Take a look here

* Ultimately, I'd say that web-browsing can be an awfully educational experience (seriously, I've learned so much of what I know from the Internet that it's nuts -- almost anything you want to know is out on the Web somewhere), more so than most "educational" games. If they have a laptop, they can browse the web, no?

I never thought much of the whole brand of "educational" software. The ones that simply included some interesting facts, like Oregon Trail or Sim City, seemed to provide a relatively low amount of knowledge for the amount of effort that gets put into them. The ones that made you do math quickly to play the game just doesn't seem to help real-world math skills much. When I learned to do math rapidly in my head, it was not using a video game.

The Web is a fantastic research tool -- boy, it's irritating when teachers try to discourage students from using any Web sources. As a matter of fact, I'd consider having a web browser always available to be one of the most valuable educational resources available. When I didn't know what a word meant, my mother always tried to train me and my siblings to go find a dictionary and look it up. The problem is that it's a real pain in the ass to do so, especially if I'm comfortably reading a book. If I have a nice, fast, stable-and-not-swapping system with a web browser up that doesn't need to run through a modem (most people used to get this in university for the first time), I'd very inclined to look up words and concepts that I'm interested about. Just recently, I read an article on "The Onion", a decidedly non-educational piece of satire that alluded to the Dauphin, some sort of French nobility. I got curious. I never, ever would have done this if I had to use paper encyclopedias, because of the effort involved, but I read up on the Dauphin, and ended up reading for much of the day about French political and military history.