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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."
What about Sim City?
sneak more porn into future Maxis titles.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Might I reccomend the Incredible Machine Contraptions? There is nothing remotely offensive about the game, it can be EASILY argued to have educational value (it's more or less a puzzle game, along with basic physics), and should be both cheap and easy on the computers.
Chromatron is a puzzle game of lasers (no, not the killing kind), optics, and geometry. It runs on Mac or Windows. The first 50 puzzle version is free, additional puzzles can be had for very cheap.
:) Give it a try.
It's also *challenging*. If you only have an hour or so per schoolday with the kids, this'll probably last until the end of the schoolyear.
Random and weird software I've written.
I think it's a fun littly game. I am 100% sure there is nothing objectionable in it, educational wise it teaches kids how to run a small business maybe? at the very least there is basic math in it you could point out.
Off the top of my head, some of these may be a bit dated.
Also from Maxis: SimCity, SimAnt
Something from the Test Drive series (its physics! You may want to avoid the "hot pursuit" series)
Conway's Game of Life
One of those universe/solar system simulations - I forget the name.
I'm sure there's plenty more out there. Good luck.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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!!
It almost makes me sick to think that school officials would have a problem with The Sims for those reasons.
I have never played, but the fact that they are concerned that characters 'may' do some things that aren't PC (that's politically correct, not personal computer) doesn't seem like such a big deal. The characters follow the players lead. If they are led to get in bed together, the player obviously had some idea what was going on before. It's not too likely that they would suddenly discover the existence of males and females who get into the same bed by playing the game.
Saying the Sims is harmful to the students is like saying that they are harmful to themselves. If they don't have dirty little minds, they won't run into these things. If they do have dirty little minds how does this affect them?
Children who grow up in a sheltered environment are often unable to properly adapt to the real world when they are forced into it.
Let the flames begin!
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.
Railroad Tycoon 2, it's got a ton of history about railroad development. There are a bunch of tycoon games in this one's footsteps, some are better than others.
Alpha Centari, is a different take on civ, there is some battle, (not bloody as I recal but there is some fighting).
If you have an older group I'd suggest wall street raider, especially if they finish a unit on the stock market. Graphics are poor but the game is quite fun. There used to be an excellent risk like game with more updated country borders, the rest of the gameplay was very similar to risk, it was quite fun too.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It teaches you math. Fragging and Tking.
It teaches you history. Nazis vs. Allies.
It teaches you physics. Fire that panzer up close.
It teaches you physical Ed. Your wrist will be tired after 10 hrs of wolfing.
It teaches you art. Watch that blood splat.
It teaches you chemistry. Stab someone with that poision needle.
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.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
FreeCiv supports OS X with Fink. I would think this would be a great game for the kids to get together and play. It would teach history, let them learn about ancient technologies etc.
If you feel like paying money, you might also think about getting Civilization 3, I've never played this game myself, but I recall Civilization II had a lot of good historical information about various technlogies and epochs in history. I would assume that this version would have something like that as well.
If you have any windows machines you might also consider exposing them to Alice, not it's not American McGee's twisted (and quite fun) game, but a project from Carnegie Mellon to teach kids about 3D and Game Programming.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
This might sound like a strange solution, but there were tonnes of good educational programs on some of those old 8-bit machines... especially the Apple ][ and even for the Commodore 64.
If you can fish some of these old-skool educational programs out and run emulators on your laptops, then you've got something at least.
Dunno about the legality of using old software on an emulator... but I doubt anyone will really care.
I remember playing loads of educational games on the Commodore 64 back in the day... "Rocky's Boots" and "Goldfields" were my favourites.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This program is an excelent, free space simulator. Fly the Apollo 11 mission, launch the space shuttle and dock at ISS, or for real fun, launch a probe from earth, have it gravity assist around venus, and go out to the outer planets. The physics seems very realistic and real world. Math will for sure be a huge help in this. The main site is Here, and also check out Dan's ORbiter page, with many great addons and sound updates here. For a great video of orbiter in action (But without any view of the controls or the mathmatics involved) check out video 3 from this page.
Did I mention its all free as in beer?
Although probably a bit more expensive then you were probably planning on spending, you might want to consider The Wild Divine Project.
From the site: The Journey to Wild Divine is more than a computer adventure. It integrates a personal spiritual quest with an innovative biofeedback interface and high-end multimedia production. The result is an unparalleled and fulfilling "Inner-Active" experience.
Basically, you explore the virtual world and learn to complete tasks that require you to learn to control your pulse and breathing rate using a biofeedback system.
I haven't played it... but it certainly looks cool
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
OK, they do "mate" but its about as asexual a mating as you can get (ok, they don't get "married" so I guess it will offend those who are easily offended). And the creatures aren't human and I'm not entirely clear on the specific doctrine of offense involved. Do these people require that chickens marry before they mate?
The players do get to raise the kids - and those kids are not always the best behaved of creatures so it can be an interesting process. Rather more demanding than the "carry an egg around for a week" type thing that has been popular.
Who knows - it is possible that if there are enough people who demand that everyone adhere to their particular mating rituals that maybe the makers would add in a "you must be married to have eggs" option to make using the game possible. Naturally (and I mean that word quite literally) that also raises the questions of the death of a partner, adultery, divorce and what not. Not to mention heaven and hell (and purgatory and beatrice and ...).
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.
May we never see th