New 'Civilization' Game Will Be Sold To Schools As An Educational Tool (technobuffalo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the fall of 2017, a special version of Civilization V will be made available for schools to use as an educational tool. "CivilizationEDU will provide students with the opportunity to think critically and create historical events, consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions, and to engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development," announced Take-Two Interactive Software.

"We are incredibly proud to lend one of our industry's most beloved series to educators to use as a resource to inspire and engage students further..." said the company's CEO. "I can't think of a better interactive experience to help challenge and shape the minds of tomorrow's leaders."
Special lesson plans will be created around the game, and as an alternative to standardized tests teachers will have access to a dashboard showing each student's progress. Of course, this begs an important question: Are educational videogames a good idea?

Comments

the obligatory

[originalGMC]

no mommy! I can't go outside, I have to learn for one more turn!!!

Re:the obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all fun and games until the quiet Indian kid who sits in the back row suddenly starts handing out nuclear armageddon.

Re:the obligatory

[originalGMC]

damn you Gandhi!

WTF is happening

[NotInHere]

Are schools becoming time waste institutions? why send your kids to school anyway, if they just play some video games. They can do that at home as well, can't they?

Or is it that teachers have to deal with children whose attention spans have been deformed by their smartphone use?

I just know that back then when I was in school, the lessons suddenly became hugely unproductive the moment the computers were turned on. Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.

Re:WTF is happening

[Opportunist]

You needed computers for that? We could find things to waste our time on and avoid learning without the aid of those damn machines.

Now get offa my lawn!

Re:WTF is happening

[sg_oneill]

When we where in school (I'm assuming your part of the pre millenial gen x's like myself) , teachers had no idea how to incorporate computers into lessons because the damn things where so new (And because getting a commodore 64 to boot over a network was.... traumatic)

They have learned. The most important asset in education is a childs attention span, and many children just dont have good attention spans, be it physiological issues like ADHD , social problems like internet or phone addiction, or because its summer outside and "skool sux miss!". So teachers have been experimenting with ways of combining the fun side and the educational side of computers. Minecraft for exploring programming and creativity. And now civ for exploring how history actually moves.

The trick is to get kids to understand that history isnt just a series of rote dates to remember (In fact knowing the exact date napoleon was born or whatever is pretty uninteresting to historians) , but a big story with processes that motored it along that we can learn from.

The trouble I think is that historians dont actually agree on much about those processes. The post-marxist school of thought sees history as a process of struggles over resources between interest groups. Foucaultians see history as a process born of the "techniques" of power the elites wield over the non elites, Traditional liberalism saw history as a Hegelian (Not to be confused with marxisms very different view) process of gradual movements towards technological, social and cultural perfection. Structuralism sees history as a process analogous to language that can be interpretted along symbolic measures, whilst the post structuralsits (or post modernists) doubt theres any real motor of history at all, bar for the views of the history teller.

Can Civ capture these debates in historiography? Probably not, but getting the idea into a kids head that maybe theres something more to history than just a series of boring dates to memorize for the test is a spectacular achievement and might well even lead to a more circumspect group of adults that look for the big picture rather than the shallow immediacy of consumerist nihilism.

Re:WTF is happening

[Kokuyo]

My year of birth is 1981 and I went to school in Switzerland.

I think you hit the problematic nail on the proverbial head: Attention span and learning by heart a bunch of dates.

See, I don't know whether an abstracted simulation of historical and social events is a good tool but let's not act like our schools (there are exceptions, of course) did a swell job of teaching us much of true interest.

I feel like I had to go over the Roman empire three or four times. My wife has similar trauma with the French revolution. However, nobody ever took the time to actually, truly teach what led to them and what consequences they had. Hell, in geography we had to mark rivers and towns and cities... Had they tied that in with history it might actually have led to an understanding of WHY our world is the way it is. Hell, rather than rivers they should have taught us about highways, at least that way we'd have some practical use for the knowledge.

It's good to know that hills were made by glaciers but that one sentence would have been enough information in that regard.

We had to become adults and be interested in history to learn that Celts weren't actually barbarians enlightened by the Roman empire but rather were providing fine jewelry and soaps on a quality level the Romans had a hard time achieving. And these were the people who were our forefathers. Instead we glorified the conquerors.

  We had to find out much later that while the French revolution was, more or less, the founding of todays understanding of democracy and the people's power, the people leading it were just as much opportunistic aristocrats as the ones who ended up on the guillotine (and nobody ever told us how many innocents were killed that way either!).

It's the same thing with people like Magellan or your very own Columbus. So much of what we were taught about these people was so very wrong it's appalling.

Frankly, I believe we should take kids when they enter school, show them how google works an ask them to tell us their opinion (!) on how much their book might be wrong about certain events in history.

Children are so very inquisitive and they can be like freaking drug sniffing dogs when they feel they're being lied to. Let's use that! It'll teach them to gather information and build an opinion just as much as how to question that which kinda feels too comfortable to be the absolute truth.

Re:WTF is happening

[dbIII]

Back before you were born we were using Apple ][ computers to run a little simulation game in schools (Hamurabi or slightly different spelling) that was the forerunner to "Civilization", as an exercise in resource management.

Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.

A lack of self-discipline has nothing to do with using a simulation game as a prop for teaching.

Re: WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

well, for some of us the time suck was Lemonade Stand, Mosquitos-vs-DDT, Oregon Trail...

Re:WTF is happening

[Dog-Cow]

FB and YT? Did you graduate HS last year?

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's good to know that hills were made by glaciers but that one sentence would have been enough information in that regard."
Except that it would be wrong. You should have paid attention when the subject of Plate Tectonics came up.
Mountains and hills are the result of Tectonic activity; Glaciers are but one example of Erosional forces that tend to even them out again. One oddity of Glaciers near where I live: the hills are scattered with boulders that originated some two hundred miles to the East. But then the hills around here are rising at an average of a couple of millimeters a year, and the eroded tops of them are covered with the fossils of shellfish deposited some 500,000 years ago, when we were in an inland sea.

Re: WTF is happening

[I'm New Around Here]

well, for some of us the time suck was Lemonade Stand, ...

... loaded off a cassette tape.

Re:WTF is happening

[DarkTempes]

Just because it'll be "made available" doesn't mean any school boards or teachers will actually buy it or waste a significant amount of time on this.
They might or they might not. And Slashdot should have said "marketed" rather than "sold".

In terms of games in school, educational games can be highly useful. For example, games like Mario Teaches Typing.
My dad has used computers for longer than I've been alive and still can't touch type while public schools taught me to do it early (grades 1-3).
I think I played Oregon Trail as well (in 2nd grade?) in school, though I'm not sure what the teacher's reasoning for that was.
Maybe it was a rainy day and we couldn't go out for recess.

I could maybe see a highly modified educational version of Civ being useful for teaching history or as a reward just to keep kids busy on a day when you have a substitute teacher and the faster kids already did the busy work. Probably not but maybe.

And if computers led to unproductive class time for you then really it was your teacher that was at fault.
My High School computer science classes were highly productive because the teacher didn't just send students to the computers and then ignore them.
He kept tabs on students, and I believe, had remote monitoring software so he could tell when students were off task.
And, with the tasks given, there wasn't enough class time to waste much if you wanted to pass.

Kids who are determined not to learn aren't going to learn anyway. They'll sleep through class or doodle or read books or play with their phone or whatever.
I really don't think technology has changed this in any meaningful way and I'm fairly certain that every adult in every generation has wondered "Are schools becoming time waste institutions?".

Yes, they always have been time waste institutions.
Every time there's a PA announcement it interrupts class and wastes time.
Every time teachers have to reteach subjects because classes from previous schools didn't properly prepare students it wastes time.
Standardized test preparation wastes tons of time.
When the teacher is sick or needs a personal day and you have a substitute teacher who gives busy work it wastes time.
All of the little interruptions and deviations from schedule waste time.

But, in my experience, teachers generally do the best they can and schools are, obviously, still worth it.
They certainly do a better job than I think most parents would. Most parents don't even take parenting classes, let alone get education certifications/degrees.
</rant>

Re:WTF is happening

[thesupraman]

Are you new to this?

Seriously, schools these days are run for the benefit of the administrators first, and the teachers second, the children are somewhere down in the double digits I suspect. For any changes in teaching you probably need to look at the question of 'will this reduce staff numbers, or make dealing with the teachers union easier' because those are the two primary questions.

We are seeing 5 and 6 year olds coming home proudly telling mummy that they have been 'learning mindcraft' at school today (replace the d with and e and you will find out what they were playing if it is not obvious). While it may contain a few ounces of educational content for somewhat older children, it is just being used as brain candy for those poor kids, and this will just be more of the same.

This is an old technique, known as 'hook them while they are young' for those who dont realise. It was what first made apple big (the old apple that was, late days of apple II and early days of mac) where they basically gave products to schools (these days they use Ipads, and for some reason often make more than retail for their efforts, which is a separate issue).

The ONLY solution is to tie the school up by continuously questioning the school at all levels, and it will take a lot of parents to do that. Teachers (well, the bad ones at least) HATE dealing with parents, as do the administrators. It is their weakness. You are NOT wasting their time if there is a real issue, and there is a hope (if small) that you can push change if they have to talk to you enough, because they will do anything to avoid that. You need enough parents doing it so that they cannot pick on a couple of individuals children as payback. Get organised. Terrifying that it comes to that, but there you go.

Re:WTF is happening

[CrimsonAvenger]

Back before you were born we were using Apple ][ computers to run a little simulation game in schools

Back before the Apple II was born, I was finishing High School, you ignorant clod!

Re:WTF is happening

[Kokuyo]

Well, I was taught that our hills and valleys are basically what happens when glaciers carry sediments to a location and their melting creates rivers that carve up the landscape.

Moraines and such, you know? If that's wrong, blame my teachers.

Re:WTF is happening

[Kokuyo]

And by the way: Thank you for concentrating on the important part of my post. Appreciated.

Re:WTF is happening

[dbIII]

The above poster was complaining about some new-fangled thing in schools as if such things were not used in teaching before he was born. Please do try to keep up, it's not a very difficult thread to follow.

Re:WTF is happening

[GrumpySteen]

What's happening?

A company is trying to eek out a bit more profit from a six year old product that's at the end of it's sales life by remaking it as an educational product.

This is just a press release from that company. It's not a policy or endorsement from the Department of Education. It's not something that anyone is doing today. It's just a company hoping that someone will buy their product.

Chill out already.

Re:WTF is happening

[aliquis]

Hell, rather than rivers they should have taught us about highways

There was this Swedish TV show in style with "Think; what if?" which took up Swedish historical happenings which had consequences and what could have happened if they wouldn't had happened.

Anyway one of the episodes was about Sweden and Finland and how one guy in charge of a fortress in Finland surrendered to the Russians who had besieged it but unlikely would had been able to actually take if had they had to try by force rather than convincing him to simply surrender.

Anyway that brought up our capital Stockholm which doesn't sit in the middle of the country which is Sweden of today but rather on our east coast bordering the Baltic sea. The reason for that being that Sweden and Finland was one for long and when it was that way then it WAS in the middle of the country and the Baltic sea (at-least up here) kinda was "our" sea and an enabled of communication with Finland rather than something which separated us. (Similarly the vikings traveled the rivers all the way down to what is now Turkey and Iraq and so on.)

Anyway, once again, where I'm coming with this is that in historical times rivers weren't as useless and uninteresting and just "bodies of water" as you may view them now. They WERE the highways of that age. Rivers and seas were enablers of travel when roads didn't existed or you didn't had a capability to travel the other terrain quickly and straight. ... and now you've learned me something. I thought Celts were from the more modern areas rather form where they were from and at times on a much larger area =P
The conquerors write the history, Swedish history is changed a lot right now.

Frankly, I believe we should take kids when they enter school, show them how google works an ask them to tell us their opinion (!) on how much their book might be wrong about certain events in history.

The kids would likely judge history from how society is today and not vs how it was then and for the people living at that time.

Re:WTF is happening

[dbIII]

Seriously, schools these days are run for the benefit of the administrators first, and the teachers second

IMHO you've mentioned the fundamental problem just by naming the management structure. In other places with better outcomes you don't have the American fantasy of a manager who can run anything but instead a very experienced teacher who knows how to run a school effectively.

The ONLY solution is to tie the school up by continuously questioning the school at all levels, and it will take a lot of parents to do that

In those other places there are things like "parent's and citizens associations" who do that. It seems to work better in small towns instead of city suburbs but it does seem to work.

Re:WTF is happening

[GrumpySteen]

The trick is to get kids to understand that history isnt just a series of rote dates to remember (In fact knowing the exact date napoleon was born or whatever is pretty uninteresting to historians) , but a big story with processes that motored it along that we can learn from.

Yeah, no. The trick is to get TEACHERS to understand that history isn't just a series of rote dates and names to remember. The bulk of most history tests is exactly that, so any kid that doesn't do the rote memorization and regurgitation will fail.

Re:WTF is happening

[cronot]

I think I've mentioned it before in the past, though in another context: "The Time Ships", by Stephen Baxter. It's an official sequel to H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine".

The book itself is obviously not about education, but that subject is brought about when the protagonist gets into contact with another species (which I'll not name lest I spoil the book). Basically, the approach to education for that species is that children would be taught how to seek information, and then pretty much just told to go educate themselves, seeking out whatever they want.

Of course that would be utopia for humans, because we are mostly hedonistic by nature, but all the same this idea from that book really stuck with me, and made me realize in which way our educational system is a failure: children are usually just told to memorize stuff, a big part of which they will never really use, when they really should be taught how to "think" - how to seek information, stimulate curiosity and solve problems with information they gather themselves.

Fortunately, with initiatives such as these, it seems as though this is slowly changing.

Re:WTF is happening

[dywolf]

STFU noob.
Mathblaster was awesome.

Re:WTF is happening

[Ogive17]

I played Oregon Trail during school in the mid 80s. Not much, maybe an hour every other week since there was 1 computer for 20 kids.

I'd be interested in what changes they make. I see some potential in teach lessons.

Re:WTF is happening

[Gilgaron]

But as the post you are replying to indicated, it can be seen as problematic in how to describe history other than as a series of dates. If we want to go into more detail for the American Civil War than "this happened on these dates" then we will be describing opinions as to why. Some states will be fine with describing it as the "war of northern aggression" others as "the war to liberate the slaves" and others in between.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick is to get kids to understand that history isnt just a series of rote dates to remember (In fact knowing the exact date napoleon was born or whatever is pretty uninteresting to historians) , but a big story with processes that motored it along that we can learn from.

I hated history until I reached college. Then the teachers were great. They would all setup the context and suddenly history was interesting. Pre-University, history class was like listening to Ben Stein drone-reading from a book. At the University level, the teachers got excited and their excitement transfers. It was more like watching a History or discovery channel documentary.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, in geography we had to mark rivers and towns and cities... Had they tied that in with history it might actually have led to an understanding of WHY our world is the way

They did this at my University. I wish they did this in school. It was so much more interesting this way, I learned a lot more, I retained more, and I learned to think differently about the world.

Re:WTF is happening

[Hognoxious]

Blimey, Gunner Graham. If you're saying that history is complicated and full of unexpected consequences, butterfly effects and unknown unknowns[1] to the extent that it would be almost impossible to simulate a decent portion of it[2] in a game I'm right there with you.

[1] Like some berk with a head like a haybale conning everybody into doing something retarded.

[2] As opposed to just a small subset - military and/or economics, etc.

Re:WTF is happening

[mrchaotica]

When we where in school (I'm assuming your part of the pre millenial gen x's like myself) , teachers had no idea how to incorporate computers into lessons because the damn things where so new (And because getting a commodore 64 to boot over a network was.... traumatic)

I'm from what I've heard called "the Oregon Trail generation" (late gen-x / early millennial), and some of our teachers "got it" (e.g. using the eponymous software I just mentioned, along with Number Munchers, LOGO programming, Hypercard, etc.) while others treated the computers as glorified typewriters.

Re:WTF is happening

[mrchaotica]

Not all hills are moraines. Some are caused by things like uplift and volcanism. (You should have been taught that in Switzerland; that's where the Alps come from!)

Anyway, one of the best things I've ever seen teaching the "why" of geography (instead of just the "what") is How the States Got Their Shapes on the History Channel. I wish there was something similar for world history.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've mentioned it before in the past, though in another context: "The Time Ships", by Stephen Baxter. It's an official sequel to H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine".

The book itself is obviously not about education, but that subject is brought about when the protagonist gets into contact with another species (which I'll not name lest I spoil the book). Basically, the approach to education for that species is that children would be taught how to seek information, and then pretty much just told to go educate themselves, seeking out whatever they want.

Of course that would be utopia for humans, because we are mostly hedonistic by nature, but all the same this idea from that book really stuck with me, and made me realize in which way our educational system is a failure: children are usually just told to memorize stuff, a big part of which they will never really use, when they really should be taught how to "think" - how to seek information, stimulate curiosity and solve problems with information they gather themselves.

Fortunately, with initiatives such as these, it seems as though this is slowly changing.

The children still need some guidance however to make sure that they become decently well-rounded, quite a number otherwise would become hyper-focused on the things that they enjoy and willfully ignorant in everything else. The downside with self-teaching is that one can easily miss certain fundamentals, that while they can be worked around, result in someone who wastes a lot of time down the road doing things the hard way for no good reason (pretty much everyone here has known at least one self-taught programmer with such a problem.)

Re:WTF is happening

[T.E.D.]

It's the same thing with people like Magellan or your very own Columbus. So much of what we were taught about these people was so very wrong it's appalling

That's the thing: How history as taught to schoolkids is and has always been completely political. Its about teaching kids the "proper" foundational mythology. If that makes it so whitewashed that its boring, more's the better. Then kids won't go off on their own and learn about the bad things their ancestors did (or worse yet, their government is still doing).

On the plus side, the result tends to be so boring that kids don't actually learn much of this BS. I think kids are actually a lot smarter here than we give them credit for. Those of us who got interested in History in general did so off of our own research, not through school.

Obligatory plug: Wikipedia today is a great resource, but if you have questions about history, check out the History StackExchange site

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, hate to break this to you, but I went to school in the 80s to early 90s and I remember doing an assignment in 1991 in geography class based around sim city (as run on the old mac bricks). Not the same game but the principle would hold.

It was actually a reasonably good assignment. Kids were engaged in an activity that actually interested them, lessons were leant, assignments were handed in etc etc. And no-one found the cheats until after the assignment was complete.

Mind you this was pre internet connectivity. Not sure it would be so productive now.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Glaciers that carve channels through plateaus produce valleys.

Your move

Re:WTF is happening

[alvinrod]

Even if you do get the teachers to understand that (if they don't already) grading exams based on rote dates and names is a lot easier than an essay about the causes that contributed to a particular event or what the likely impact of a different policy would have been given other historical factors at the time.

I had the same thing for the most part where primary school history was mostly names and dates. I had one teacher in secondary school who did a bit more than that, but it was still mostly names and dates. It wasn't until taking college history that I had any real interest in the class itself as the professors completely ignored dates and names and we spent an entire semester just discussing how peasants and common folk lived through the medieval era and how some of their experiences shaped laws and other parts of culture that are still around today. A lot of the work we did involved writing essays or having online discussion and I suspect that were it not for a cadre of cheap grad students, the professor wouldn't have been able to do the grading.

Re:WTF is happening

[argStyopa]

Except, of course, the problematic nail with the google-learning mechanism is this: as much as the historical canon is controlled (more or less) by power elites with a vested interest in presenting a certain historical narrative of what happened, so to is the internet (and really, the wide world) full of smaller groups all EACH insisting that their particular version of events is the "one true narrative".

None of them has a monopoly on the truth, of course.

But one of the facts of 'dealing with the internet' (that even many adults can't seem to cope with) is the cacacophy of noise where everyone insists they're experts in the subject at hand. And if you're just source-counting, there are probably in fact MORE websites - some frighteningly slick and professional - that assert the moon landings were faked (for example) than those that recap what we believe we know is "the truth".

So while I concede that to accept the historical canon is to (in a sense) swallow the kool-aide of a specific viewpoint, to simply refuse to accept any narrative leaves one open to far more pernicious and frankly dangerous ideas.

It's almost like intellectual antibiotics: Aggressive antibiotic sprays will certainly kill those germs (giving us a momentary illusion that our countertops are 'sterile' and uber-clean), but in FACT it means that all the really nasty germs (that the otherwise less-bad biota kept away) can now get a foothold. In the 'establishment' historical canon, we know there are likely ideas that are wrong and/or biased, but at least then there's a framework to start the intellectual process to validate or reject specific assumptions.

Even Archimedes admitted he'd need a fulcrum to move the world.

Re:WTF is happening

[ultranova]

Had they tied that in with history it might actually have led to an understanding of WHY our world is the way it is.

The problem is, the forces which shaped our present are still around, Capitalism most notably. It's not possible to examine their past without commenting on their nature, which will always step on some entrenched interest's toes.

For example, how do you propose explaining WHY French Revolution happened without mentioning wealth concentration? It started as a bread riot, after all. Explaining the raise of Communism isn't really possible without examining the working conditions and overall economic effects of unregulated Capitalism. Then there's religion, leading to such non-controversional subjects like its overall role in human history, the rise of Christianity, Orthodox/Catholic split, Catholic/Protestant split, rise of Islam, etc.

In other words, school can't teach WHY our world is as it is because people don't agree on what the answer is.

Re:WTF is happening

[ultranova]

A lack of self-discipline has nothing to do with using a simulation game as a prop for teaching.

If a teaching prop requires the student to have a certain amount of self-discipline, and the student does not have it, then using that prop with that student is counter-productive.

Re:WTF is happening

[ultranova]

In terms of games in school, educational games can be highly useful. For example, games like Mario Teaches Typing.

What's wrong with Typing of the Dead? "Type faster or the zombies will eat you" is a great motivator :).

Re:WTF is happening

[0100010001010011]

Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something,

That certainly dates you. We played computer games all the time.

In 5th grade I wanted to have the absolute top score in some Math program. I ended up putting it on a floppy drive, taking it home, figuring out how it stored the 'high score' data and Kobayashi Maru'd the results.

Give the Civilization a decent API and let the kids set up bots and automatic governing.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Children are so very inquisitive and they can be like freaking drug sniffing dogs when they feel they're being lied to. Let's use that!

While we're at it, we should probably also stop lying so much to children about drugs.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called grades. that kid doesn't stay on task, he gets bad grades. Oh, but now we penalize the teacher for that. I see you are in favor of that mindless abdication of all responsibility for raising smarter kids.

Re:WTF is happening

[funwithBSD]

I had a good history teacher in HS.

He had us play game, on paper, to learn important concepts.

For example, we did a stock market game. Despite everyone KNOWING that the Crash happens in October of 1929, none of the players were in a cash position come October.
Drove the point home that in a bubble, no one sees the bubble, even with perfect knowledge.

My son is lucky enough to have a equally talented history teacher who demonstrated exactly how bad the Black Death was and how it was spread.
And a math teacher that had them design their own games using math principals.

I have offered my assistance to a fellow D&D player that wants to develop an entire learning program around gaming, specifically board games, card games, and pen and paper RPGs.

We both agree that at least where we are, in California, computer skills are a basic competency, and what the kids really need is the social interaction to build social skills that are increasingly missing in the modern world.

I take my son to D&D games precisely to help him develop those skills, and so far it is working pretty good. Helps to have understanding DMs, who I can occasionally bribe with homemade baked goods...

Re: WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers make people dumber. More computer time in the classroom.

Re:WTF is happening

[Rastl]

I just know that back then when I was in school, the lessons suddenly became hugely unproductive the moment the computers were turned on. Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.

We didn't get calculators in school until I was in 8th grade. So whining about attention spans of students when the school can't set up a decent firewall doesn't address the issue.

Sure it's a game. Sure it simplifies the historical process. But if it gets them learning and wanting to learn then it might be a good teaching aid. Not a replacement - but another teaching aid.

I think the downfall here is that it has nothing to do with the standardized testing required to get school funding.

Re:WTF is happening

[barc0001]

> Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.

I think that's more the fault of the administration than anything else. Why are the computers even able to reach Youtube or Facebook? That should be blocked by policy or firewall. Hell, when I was in school the computers weren't even networked. People were either doing the lesson plan or nothing at all.

But all that aside and to answer the original question, I do think there is a place for learning by games. If something catches a person's interest they are far more likely to learn and retain that knowledge when doing it. I've heard many people say they only know of many historical figures because of Age of Empires, for example.

Re:WTF is happening

[Kjella]

You needed computers for that? We could find things to waste our time on and avoid learning without the aid of those damn machines.

Yes but those were poor, barely reaching "I'm so bored out of my skull I'll do anything to break the tedium" levels of waste. With an Internet full of cat videos a button away we can waste time far more effectively and effortlessly than before, reaching whole new levels of unlearning.

Re:WTF is happening

[amicusNYCL]

I just know that back then when I was in school, the lessons suddenly became hugely unproductive the moment the computers were turned on. Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube

"Back when you were in school" people were on Facebook and Youtube? "Back when I was in school" we were playing Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, etc, and it was entirely possible to learn with a computer. Maybe the problem now isn't the computers, maybe the problem is that kids don't know how or don't want to learn.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of hills were made by glaciers. And anyone that knows that, probably was in plate tectonics class as well.

Lumping hills into mountains is a bit misleading.

Re:WTF is happening

[tlhIngan]

The thing is, Civ is a simulation. History can be boiled down to dates and events and other boring crap that has nothing to do with life.

But that's the scholastic view of history, which makes it absolutely worthless to anyone. History isn't about dates, names, places and events. It's all about the leadup - how did the events of World War I lead to the Nazi uprising? Why did normal German citizens do nothing about the Nazis?

Yes, it's somewhat important to know the dates of WWI and WWII, but those are facts, and facts can be looked up in a book, online, whatever. Memorization of those dates has no practical use.

What has practical use is knowing the background to all these events. How did our form of justice evolve? The Constitution of the United States is an important document, but what's the background behind it?

History is known for repeating itself, and it's far more important to know the leadups and background of the events than to know dates, times, places and people.

Something like Civ can simulate.

Rote memorization is out. Google/Libraries/Books/etc are the tools for that. What's far more important is the analytical part of history. The real issues are why and how. For example, rather than knowing dates and people of Brexit (which are just pure facts), what about analysis? Could the rise of the Leave voters be traced to any other event in history and how does it compare with what happened? (Think - rise of unions, or other sort of events). Can the effects of Brexit be predicted based on similar happenings in the past? These are the sort of questions we should ask in History. Not Hitler's birthday.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

With THAT student, perhaps. But that doesn't mean other students shouldn't be able to benefit from that tool.

Re:WTF is happening

[Hognoxious]

I was thinking of that before I even read the last sentence.

I once took over some stuff from a guy who couldn't code "test at the top" loops and "test at the bottom" ones. I forget which way round it was, but you can imagine what a mare's nest it was. Flags & conditionals for whether or not it's the first cycle, auxiliary counters that are one more or one less than the proper counter would be...

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've mentioned it before in the past, though in another context: "The Time Ships", by Stephen Baxter. It's an official sequel to H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine".

The book itself is obviously not about education, but that subject is brought about when the protagonist gets into contact with another species (which I'll not name lest I spoil the book). Basically, the approach to education for that species is that children would be taught how to seek information, and then pretty much just told to go educate themselves, seeking out whatever they want.

Of course that would be utopia for humans, because we are mostly hedonistic by nature, but all the same this idea from that book really stuck with me, and made me realize in which way our educational system is a failure: children are usually just told to memorize stuff, a big part of which they will never really use, when they really should be taught how to "think" - how to seek information, stimulate curiosity and solve problems with information they gather themselves.

Fortunately, with initiatives such as these, it seems as though this is slowly changing.

The children still need some guidance however to make sure that they become decently well-rounded, quite a number otherwise would become hyper-focused on the things that they enjoy and willfully ignorant in everything else. The downside with self-teaching is that one can easily miss certain fundamentals, that while they can be worked around, result in someone who wastes a lot of time down the road doing things the hard way for no good reason (pretty much everyone here has known at least one self-taught programmer with such a problem.)

Except that if they know how to learn at the point when those missed 'fundmantals" actually become important they'll juts learn them.

The "you must learn this because I think it's important" paradigm is actually the root of the problem with the curent primary education system.

Anything that is actually important (math, reading comprehension, and critical thinking) will come up no mater what trivia the children are interested in. Then highscool can handle vocational training for trades (carpentry, auto-macanics, computer programing, graphic design, etc) that require a structured curriculum, and college can handle the pure sciences and engineering disciplines where you need both awareness of the extant body of work and the specific skills to produce original research/design.

Stuff like history, philosophy, art, etc. really doens't need to be in a degree program, and would best serve as things to put in front of children in the inetrest of getting them inetreted in something.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

So I actually teach using Civ V. It's a very powerful tool when wielded correctly. Kids learn about how things interact between nations, resource scarcity, and the reasons why "just go to war with them" or "just nuke them" doesn't *actually* solve international conflict the way they expect. Sometimes war works to solve your issues, but others it puts you in a very difficult spot and/or enrages the rest of the empires. It's a complex simulation that gets kids to work with those concepts hands-on in ways that they have not before.

They can also play with/against each other, and discover the powers of cooperation and the dangers of entangling alliances.

And because of the nature of Civ, I have never had a youtube problem.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually what we should be doing is teaching students how to evaluate sources, and how to do proper research.

You pose them a question like "why did WWI start" and turn them loose in a library. Then once they've all come up with an answer along the lines of "the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and secrete mutual defense pacts" you split them up and ask them questions about why they think that's the answer. The ones who deserve full credit will have found a source that cites one or more primary sources, and be able to explain some reasoning for why they believe those primary sources hold up. Those who deserve partial credit will have a secondary source and a justification for why they belive it, or a primary source and no particular defense of it's authenticity. Those who just stopped after reading wikipedia or asked their best freind get an F.

Re:WTF is happening

[NotInHere]

No, I'm a true millenial. I mean, who has Facebook and youtube while they still went to school, only millenials (and later generations) have that. Our teachers were nothing close to millenials though. They didn't know how to handle computers. Nor did they know how to appease a class. In fact some pupils even openly demanded from the teacher to open internet access (he had an admin console at the teacher computer which allowed this), and some teachers even did.

The younger teachers who did know how to handle computers didn't really know how to teach stuff, after all they were super young. Also most of them only knew how to log in to facebook and stuff.

Re:WTF is happening

[NotInHere]

No, but close. I graduated this decade. I don't really know how I came to this site and not ended up with reddit or something :).

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Why even send kids to nursery, all they do is put shapes in holes and finger paint. WOW, so educational!

You'd have to be dumb to not understand the usefulness of gamification.
Military and space agencies use it! Even medical groups are learning its worth.

I learned to type really quickly with some shit little typing game in IT class.
I learned to understand some abstract physics with games and simulations.
Many more things.

The "education is meant to be boring" meme is the worst thing that happened to education.
Education was supposed to be FUN, to enthuse and make people WANT to learn.
Educators that can do that universally get better pass-rates for their students.
Having a shit teacher is enough to ruin your whole future.
It is irresponsible to have teachers in education that do not like their job.
I had a couple of those and it basically put me off those topics. (Art. depressing prick he was, the previous teacher was vastly superior and strict in the right ways, sadly died due to sudden illness)

Teachers that cannot control their students are also a problem.
The cane should be brought back to be honest. Yes, I'm that guy.
Kids are undisciplined little fucks these days. They need a good slap to get them right. Or physical exertion as punishment like military school.
Fucking kids these days don't know how good they have it.

Re:WTF is happening

[BitterOak]

(And because getting a commodore 64 to boot over a network was.... traumatic)

Traumatic? I would have thought impossible. Please explain how one sets up a Commodore 64 to "boot over a network". I grew up with a C64 and I don't remember any such capability. There was a serial port which could support up to a 1200 baud modem as I recall, but no capability to boot over the modem. In fact, the computer's "operating system" (essentially a BASIC interpreter) was in the ROM memory, and didn't even need to boot from the disk.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

4/20 is a vital date to remember thankyouverymuch.

Re:WTF is happening

[david_thornley]

The problem is that history has facts that certain people find uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, secession was primarily about slavery, and when the war started the Union was primarily fighting to reestablish the US more or less as it had been. Lincoln was anti-slavery, but he was also a politician, and knew that a war to end slavery wasn't going to be particularly attractive. He made the Emancipation Proclamation for its diplomatic effect, as it pretty well prevented Britain from direct intervention on the Confederate side, since the war was between a de facto country based on slavery and a country that was apparently anti-slavery.

Throw over a century of arguing and justification in there, and just finding out what went on gets complicated.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting we teach lies in public school history for fear of offending someone?

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

In primary school (early to late 80s) we had stickybear thump to learn typing, turtle graphics for whatever the hell that was for, carmen sandiego for geography and random facts, and all manner of rather dull maths games. In high school (late 80s to mid 90s) we had some sort of text adventure game (we had to draw the map based on descriptions from the game) and sim city.

So nothing particularly new here.

Re:WTF is happening

[imidan]

I just tried it. It's better than the typing exercises that were inflicted upon me as a kid... transcribing nonsense like 'ask a sad dad lad had gad' and on and on to infinity. My typing speed was always poor on such things because it's gibberish. The zombie game is better, although it has kind of an odd and repetitive dictionary... I've just typed the word 'xylem' more times in one game than I have in the rest of my life. My one problem with it is that it still doesn't give me a coherent sentence to type, so I feel like my WPM as measured in the game is quite a bit lower than when I type in real conditions. On the other hand, maybe for a beginning typist, that's not a big issue?

Re:WTF is happening

[sg_oneill]

Traumatic? I would have thought impossible. Please explain how one sets up a Commodore 64 to "boot over a network". I grew up with a C64 and I don't remember any such capability. There was a serial port which could support up to a 1200 baud modem as I recall, but no capability to boot over the modem. In fact, the computer's "operating system" (essentially a BASIC interpreter) was in the ROM memory, and didn't even need to boot from the disk.

No it wasnt anything as fancy as that. It was some sort of interface where we'd type in the LOAD "*",8,1 and then it would load something to the entire class, from memory. I was only a kid at the time, but I believe it was some sort of shared hard drive type thing. Might have used the IDE64 interface which supported network drives. It was a heck of a long time ago.

Re:WTF is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Its nice to know you read and misunderstood the philosophy of history (completely wrong on everything -- marxism, 'foucaultians', hegelians, etc.); at least someone is trying.

Re:WTF is happening

[ultranova]

Are you suggesting we teach lies in public school history for fear of offending someone?

No, I'm saying that not matter what you teach, lots of people will accuse you of indoctrinating their children with politically motivated lies, and since there's no objective way to decide whether that's true or not we err on the side of caution, so you can't teach much of anything.

Re:WTF is happening

[ultranova]

It's called grades. that kid doesn't stay on task, he gets bad grades.

How does that improve his performance?

Oh, but now we penalize the teacher for that.

If you fail at your job, in this case making the student learn, surely your compensation should reflect that?

I see you are in favor of that mindless abdication of all responsibility for raising smarter kids.

That is odd, seeing how I'm arguing for raising smart - or at least educated - kids using the most efficient method available, rather than letting the student's performance suffer for the teacher's failure to do so.

Re:WTF is happening

[originalGMC]

I must have spent a thousand hours on monochrome oregon trail. And LOOKATMENOW!! Commenting on /. like a(n) ____ . (noun)

Of course...

[SeattleLawGuy]

Educational Video games are a great idea. When I was a kid they taught me fractions, algebra, digital logic, and other basic academic skills. I would not have learned those for another 5-10 years if I had waited for adults to teach them.

Re:Of course...

[I'm New Around Here]

We didn't have computers in the schools when I started. I learned division by looking at a quarter in the third grade. The cirriculum didn't have it for another few months, as it was just getting into multiplication.

I also taught my daughter the Pythagorean Theorem using pennies, the week before she started kindergarten. And the week before first grade, and the week before second grade. By the fourth grade she remembered it.

Re:Of course...

[SeattleLawGuy]

We didn't have computers in the schools when I started. I learned division by looking at a quarter in the third grade. The cirriculum didn't have it for another few months, as it was just getting into multiplication.

I also taught my daughter the Pythagorean Theorem using pennies, the week before she started kindergarten. And the week before first grade, and the week before second grade. By the fourth grade she remembered it.

Excellent! Whatever tool works. I learned all this at home; computers in school were nowhere near as educational, probably because activities on them were more directed. Although I'm also a big fan of taking the computer and TV away for at least a summer or two, so that books and activities are the only entertainment available...

Re:Of course...

[GuB-42]

There is a whole generation of kids who learned English as non-native speakers through video games.

Lobbiyng educational boards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Nobody has done that. Oh, no, never!

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
https://edudownloads.azureedge...

(If I ever met a fairy granting me the fulfillment of but *one* wish, that would be to kick one of those lobbiysts in the nuts. Really hard.

Re:Lobbiyng educational boards?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didnt know queers granted wishes. What part of them do you rub first?

Well, I'm off to Orlando to find out.

pandoras box

[Anonymous Coward]

This will open up a whole can of worms, soon all the education is expected to be fun for kids ! Imagine a future where people fondly reminisce about the school-days and the fun they had in the classroom ? Or even worse ! a world where children actually become well informed and educated adults due to interesting school activity that does not tire the mind and captivates their attention and imagination ? I am not sure I am ready to live on a planet like that, I consider myself lucky to have gotten the "real" bureaucrats education, with tons of dry literature and endless piles of useless homework of which I only remember that I wrote "something" together to appease the teachers, now I am a proud member of the bureaucratic machine and hope that the world will never change .

Re:pandoras box

[Panoptes]

' Imagine a future where people fondly reminisce about the school-days and the fun they had in the classroom'

There's a wonderful short story written by Isaac Asimov in 1951 called 'The Fun They Had', set in the far future when all education is home-based and completely computerised. It's just as relevant today as it was then.

Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

And the next game on the schools' list is The Sims to learn kids some social skills?

Re:Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

And which game will be used for Sex Ed? The hot coffee mod for GTA?

Re: Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

Pornhub already provides that

Re: Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough; although I was more thinking in an interactive experience.

Re: Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not convinced the Sims would be a good way to learn social skills, I do think it might be useful as a motivational tool for some people.

Re: Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

Followed by DOOM for the kids who have had enough and just want to frag everything.

It's educational in a Modern America with freely available automatic weapons.

Re: Let's extrapolate

[Anonymous Coward]

for free

It'll teach an excellent lesson

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Try your hardest and grind for many hours to improve things, advance civilization, bring about peace after war, build a nation. What a grand and exhilarating endeavour!

Then, when it gets too hard, enter a cheat code. Congratulation, you've now learned how to be a successful politician.

Re:It'll teach an excellent lesson

[amicusNYCL]

... and then Gandhi nukes you.

Ok seeing as decline and fall is popular

[Crashmarik]

Just how are they going to address the effects of uncontrolled immigration on civilizations ?
They just going to leave Rome out ?

Also Civ5 has a bunch of win at the endgame features, that reflect the "End Of History"
Seems History hasn't actually ended, So their whole idea of a cultural victory is meaningless.

Re:Ok seeing as decline and fall is popular

[dbIII]

Just how are they going to address the effects of uncontrolled immigration on civilizations ?

They can teach about Gold Rush era USA to cover that. It seemed to work out pretty well in the long run IMHO.

Re:Ok seeing as decline and fall is popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for the red folk.

New?

[bzn]

Modified maybe, but certainly not new...

Civ V has been around for years, with Civ:BE coming after, and now Civ VI is around the corner. New makes it sound like they're giving away Civ VI at a cut price...

Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't going to teach students much about real-world economies, which are based entirely on fiat currencies these days, with a game economic system based on gold - with a simplistic 'spend only what you tax' system, that doesn't represent the real world of debt-funded governments, who perpetually roll-over debt through GDP growth and inflation, instead of paying it down.

The Civ game makers, should do a bit more to study the history of money and resources, going back to ancient times - it could add a very interesting and educational twist, to their gameplay dynamics.

They could start with getting a proper understanding of money (something economists themselves barely have a grasp of - failing to accurately model money, debt and banks) - David Graeber's book Debt, would be a good start.

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[I'm New Around Here]

Why was this modded down?

They aren't going to teach students much about real-world economies, which are based entirely on fiat currencies these days, with a game economic system based on gold - with a simplistic 'spend only what you tax' system, that doesn't represent the real world of debt-funded governments, who perpetually roll-over debt through GDP growth and inflation, instead of paying it down.

The Civ game makers, should do a bit more to study the history of money and resources, going back to ancient times - it could add a very interesting and educational twist, to their gameplay dynamics.

They could start with getting a proper understanding of money (something economists themselves barely have a grasp of - failing to accurately model money, debt and banks) - David Graeber's book Debt, would be a good start.

Just because it pokes someone's political/economic view in the eye isn't reason for an Offtopic mod.

For clarity, I was not the AC that posted it.

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the first time I've had posts modded down just for stating an unpopular economic opinion - it's rife here.

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[dbIII]

It took Neal Stephenson three doorstop sized books to write a vastly dumbed down but entertaining description of the proper value of modern money. Adding it to Civ is a bit of an ask. FreeCiv is available for alteration but since it's not the teachers looking for a game but the software vendors trying to push it into schools it's not being considered.

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

Real world is a very complex mix of (a) political decisions by leaders, (b) economic and financial matters, (c) domestic and foreign policies, (d) environmental factors, and more. e.g. in the game, when you explore a tile, you can see that it has oil resource when you haven't even managed to learn that knowledge. Would you expect an explorer from around time of Jesus to recognize oil resource on a piece of land?

This is about teaching history, not economics. You're right that it does not teach the full picture. However, a mod could be added that allows the player to change the type of economy similar to the different government types.

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Civ 4, international trade seems to be a panacea to all cash woes. Just land a great merchant in a foreign city, and one would get tens of thousands of coins. It's almost like the promises free traders have made for decades.

Also, I never understood how 'Environmentalism' could be an economic policy after things like Mercantilism, Free Markets and State Property. I have no idea how V or VI treat it

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

Civilization is just about a computerized board game, it's not some sort of deep economic simulator.

Europa Universalis and other Paradox grand strategy game series are closer to "historical simulations", although they too obviously take great liberties and shortcuts because they're first and foremost games

Re:Civ 5's economic system is based on gold...

[david_thornley]

Because it's opinionated, prejudiced, and arrogant, I'd say. The kicker, I think, was when the AC accused economists as a whole of being incompetent on the basis of his favorite book on the subject.

Also because it's a flagrant attempt to graft the AC's nonstandard ideas into a game that isn't really designed to showcase them. It would be possible to write a game that was educational about the history of money, I suppose, but that would be best done by designing a new game.

Almost Never

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was in elementary school, our teachers thought Civilization (the original one) was educational. Our teacher wanted us to learn about ancient Egypt at one point so we were told to go play Civilization but we must play as the Egyptians. It was, of course, completely worthless. We also had the original SimCity for Mac and that was supposed to also be educational. Instead, it generally consisted of us typing F-U-N-D over and over again before building the city to amass massive monetary reserves without suffering from the earthquake penalty. Naturally, that wasn't very educational, either.

Can those games be educational? Sure. But it's more to work on problem solving skills, trying to understand how the games work, and then being creative to build a massive city or take over the world. We didn't play them for that purpose and, as a result, it wasn't particularly educational for anyone.

Arguably, SimEarth and SimLife were more educational, though SimEarth mixed in some pseudoscience in the form of Gaia. We also had some more educational games like Outnumbered, Number Munchers, Word Munchers, and similar games. Those were more educational, but we didn't play them a whole lot.

All things considered, my experience wasn't very educational and it was mostly a waste of time. I suppose that it would be better if it was more organized with specific objectives to achieve. But that wasn't my experience.

Re:Almost Never

[Anonymous Coward]

That is strange, in that the original Civ had a lot of inaccuracies when it came to the leading cities of their empires. Like the Zulu capital was Zimbabwe, whereas in the real world, the Zulus were in Natal, in South Africa. For the Mongols, the leading cities were Samarkand, Bukhara and Nishapur - all of which were cities that the Mongols razed, whereas their real capital Karakorum was #4 in their list. To their credit, Microprose fixed that in Civ2.

Another issue w/ any civ is that cities can be located anywhere, so on an actual earth map, one could locate Moscow in Siberia, or Lyon in Spain, or Cairo in Iran. When they come up with random shapes, that's not an issue - but then again, neither is it 'educational'. I like FreeCiv somewhat better, where they list the major cities of a civilization by their native names. Where Khiva is Xeva if one plays as Uzbeks, but Khiveh if one plays as the Khwarezmids. But even they get some things wrong, like calling a monarchy head for the Moghul empire or Pakistan as 'Maharaja', when they should be 'Badshah'.

Re:Gosh darn it

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It raises an important question, if it does anything. #thatisntbeggingthequestion

Actually, for once, it can really be construed as a proper begging of the question in this blurb - although I suspect it is purely accidental on the part of the author.

Freeciv is better for suited for school

[alantus]

While Civilization might have better graphics/sounds, that doesn't add much to the "educational" value.

Freeciv is multiplayer, and you can change the rules by changing an XML, which could make things quite interesting.

And of course, it is open source, which could take the educational value to a whole different level.

Re:Freeciv is better for suited for school

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends what you are trying to accomplish. I doubt they will teach modding Civ5 in class, but probably give historical scenarios and just base it on the Civ engine.

Re:Freeciv is better for suited for school

[abies]

Graphics and sound DO add to educational value.If people are not interested, there will be no real education. Having eye-candy for long enough to get people hooked into it is very important. And freeciv really looks horrible by today's standards. And I don't think you want to tackle 'content over presentation' struggle at same time you try to get people to enjoy history and politics classes.
Civ5 also has multiplayer (not that it matters in this context)
Civ5 also can be modded, using XML and lua.

Re:Freeciv is better for suited for school

[jareth-0205]

While Civilization might have better graphics/sounds, that doesn't add much to the "educational" value.

Freeciv is multiplayer, and you can change the rules by changing an XML, which could make things quite interesting.

And of course, it is open source, which could take the educational value to a whole different level.

Maybe the base games, but they're talking about making a specific educational version. Presumably that will have more information / differently structured gameplay to expose particular facet of history / etc. Freeciv doesn't have that.

And anyway, graphics do matter. Firing the imagination is a great motivator for learning, and that's harder to do if your game looks like arse.

Re:Freeciv is better for suited for school

[Tronster]

"While Civilization might have better graphics/sounds, that doesn't add much to the "educational" value."

When I was a director of a summer "Computer Camp" in the 1990s, we allowed our campers to play Civilization II. Within it was a plethora of information on historical figures, places, etc... to which the campers were actively seeking out in the "Civilopedia" as they played. Seeing this engagement across genders and ages, was a key reason why I sought out employment at Microprose after college. (Disclaimer: I'm currently employed by Firaxis; opinions stated here are my own.)

Civ5 has built on Civ; each version has pushed the level of graphics and sound which a few have argued do add educational value as it makes the content more compelling; I agree.

The last few versions of Civilization have offered a great deal of MODability. You too can change game rules, UI, etc... by modifying XML and the supplied LUA. As for the depth of what you can do, check out this awesome WIKI fans made of the MOD system: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/...

Re:LOL

[Vrekais]

35 Million people isn't enough to become a dominant power though really is it?

Eh, yes and no.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not terribly convinced that Civilization(for all its virtues as a game; though IV was better than V unless recent expansions have fixed it) is a particularly good choice: it is 'history themed'; but fundamentally designed around being a fun game; and basically a god game: everything your civilization does is under your direct control, and aside from some minor background noise random events, you are basically the only thing driving your entire civilization. Every tech you research, every building you commission, every unit you muster and personally move around. There's really no emergent behavior, no 'society' that you have to deal with, even the constraints on what is logistically and socially possible are pretty light(compare to, say, Europa Universalis, where 'just send in the troops and conquer them, idiot.' tends to lead to decades or centuries of heightened rebellion risks and uprisings, even more so if you have ethnic and religious differences to deal with).

That said, while Civ seems like a poor candidate, "computer games" are really just the fun-optimized end of 'simulations' and 'models'; and those are clearly useful tools, for education and elsewhere.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[I'm New Around Here]

I don't think anything on the computers really helps learning these concepts any more than textbooks and handouts did before them. At least, not to the extent of the money spent on all of the tech.

If kids don't want to learn, blinking lights and synthetic music won't change that. Computers just give another way to avoid actually learning.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it's perhaps not such a good idea to teach children to wage war whenever the opportunity arises and a smaller civilization could be exterminated.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never played KSP, have you? I for sure learned a whole lot more about space, space travel and how the universe works when I picked that game up, than I knew before. Yes, I know it's not a perfect simulation, but it still teaches you more, or at least more effectively, by giving you hands-on experience with things than ever reading a book would.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that CivilizationEDU == "Civilization without the war component"

We wouldn't want any fragile trophy winners to be exposed to the real world, now would we?

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

With Civilization I'd say probably not, Kerbal Space Program however I think is a better fit for educational repurposing. While there may be some limitations on the Physics of that game it still provides an excellent representation of basic physics that students can see and interact with. And given that the game's 'failure is always an option' approach it is a great way of teaching the scientific method.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that CivilizationEDU == "Civilization without the war component"

We wouldn't want any fragile trophy winners to be exposed to the real world, now would we?

Do you think that "war" in Civilization is somehow exposing people to the real world?

Not even close. No children come home maimed and mutilated, or not at all, no mothers cry their tears, no soldiers complain of the deprivation or the slaughter.

It's clean, just pixels.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[mrchaotica]

Obligatory XKCD

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

I'm not terribly convinced that Civilization ... is a particularly good choice: it is 'history themed'; but fundamentally designed around being a fun game;

I was just playing it a bit last night. Still a fun game. But other than a little blurb on the start screen when you pick your Civ, there isn't a lot of real history content. I guess the tech tree does enforce the point that all inventions are built on the foundation of previous ones, but you could do that just as well by tacking the tech tree poster to the classroom wall, and moving on with your life.

Note that Civ VI is coming out this year. So my guess for what is going on here is that they know from past experience that sales for the previous game will disappear the instant that happens. So this is their marketing department trying to find a way get to still in some bucks from an otherwise obsolete property. Their name IS Take Two after all...

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[pla]

If kids don't want to learn, blinking lights and synthetic music won't change that. Computers just give another way to avoid actually learning.

Absolutely true, since the dawn of civilization to its end.

But for the ones who do want to learn, why should we force them to grind through page after page of painfully dry and largely useless factoids when they could learn it experientially and enjoy it via a game? The Indian campaign of Alexander the Great began in 326 BC. After conquering the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, the Macedonian king (and now the great king of the Persian Empire) Alexander launched a campaign into India. The Battle of the Jhelum river against a regional Indian King, Porus is considered by many historians...

...Blah blah frickin' blah.

Now compare that to "Oh shit, 340BCE already! Only four more turns to massively reinforce my borders or those Macedonian bastards will roll right over me!"

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[tnk1]

Yeah, I don't see video games as educationally valuable unless they simulate what they are trying to teach in some realistic fashion. Or alternately, use a technique to drill you on skills or rote knowledge, like a Mathblaster would have done.

History at a high level is about interactions between people relating to resource allocation and what ideas will be dominant. Ideas in particular.

The Civ game can certainly show a fight over resources, but the actual ideas and interactions part is not really done well. For one thing, it fails to show how the spread of ideas changes how things work over time, mostly because the player themselves is in full control and executes whatever government or idea not as a true believer, but as someone who knows what the bonuses are and can avoid the downfalls.

Kings who believe that they have divine right to rule, Communists who believe that the end of history is right around the corner, or capitalists fixated on the Invisible Hand, do not go through life like Civ players. They don't control the ideas, the ideas control them. The one thing that people need to learn from history is perspective, or they will act like they know better than the people before them when they're being controlled just as surely as those people have been in the past. And not controlled by some sort of Illuminati, but by the ideas that they do not view critically.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes. But it's still true.

It's the same as Hearts of Iron does too for instance. In school you're taught about Anschluss, "the Sudeten Crisis", the fate of Czechoslovakia, etc. But you're never really taught *why* these things happen, or in that sequence. You get some hand-waving which usually boils down to repeating the nazi-propaganda of the time, "all Germans must home to the Reich", and "Hitler was an evil expansionist", and not much more.

When you play HoI, you understand, because if you play the German campaign you're trying to solve the same real problems. (Related to manpower, production capacity and time.) N.B I'm not expressing any sympathies I'm just saying that the game does a very good job at rather brutally putting the real, underlying economical reasons on display.

So in short, there are things to learn from any game in which you have to solve the same real problems people had to solve in reality. I've never been a fan of Civilization, so I don't know if there's any real lessons to learn from it, nor do I know if the lessons you can learn from video games are always easy to understand unless you really think about them, but if the question asked is "can you learn from video games?" the answer is "Oh, hell yes".

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Civ would probably actually be vastly more educational if it had less historical 'flavor' rather than more: Since basically all the civs, government types, religions, etc. have to be reasonably balanced for gameplay purposes, they all end up being more or less interchangeable and the only connection to the things that they are named after is in the flavor text, city styles, and maybe a unique unit.

The use of historical flavor helps keep things from feeling like you are just playing a spreadsheet(at least for me, Alpha Centauri's unit design mechanics suffered a bit from that: there's no "ah, a swordsman!" it's all "Hmm, is 'plasma steel impact speeder' better than 'synthmetal particle impactor speeder'? let's check the numbers..."); but they are both limited to fairly minor differences, since otherwise civs that mostly lost in real life would be effectively unplayable and they don't respond much to what you do.

If, say, you play as the Romans; hooray, your special unit is the legion. But what if you play as Buddhist Romans dedicated to peaceful persuit of trade and culture? Well, you still get a slightly better iron-age infantry shock unit; because you're the Romans. It would be less flavorful; but more 'realistic' if instead of having historically-based flavor units, your play style influenced the shape of your civilization over time: the aggressive expansionists develop the militaristic culture and units based on specialized tactical doctrines; the culture types get extra soft-power options associated with the fact that even their enemies watch their TV shows, etc.

That would be substantially harder to do right, both in terms of the computer making decisions about your 'style' that lead to 'WTF? The computer thinks I was playing a merchant-prince? I was just funding my giant army!' and in terms of game balance; but it would more accurately capture the fact that what 'civilization' you are isn't just a veneer chosen at the beginning and static throughout history: it's what you do; and what options your choices open or close for you and how you respond to that, and so on.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's what makes Civ ultimately a 'god game', though less overtly than something like Populous. Not only are all possible concepts(with gameplay implications, you can roleplay in your head if it amuses you) fixed from the beginning of time; the player is always a dispassionate but all-powerful observer: The 'capitalist' player still decides each and every construction project in their entire empire just as the 'communist' one does; and the 'fundamentalist' gets certain bonuses and drawbacks; but no divine command to fulfill.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[slashname3]

All the options boil down to a dictatorship. The person playing makes all the decisions.

That being said, the most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Always has been, always will be.

Having played those games before, it was strategy to change the form of government at the right time to match the phase you were in to get the advantage.

Ended up being mostly about advancing through the tech tree as quickly as possible so you ended up with the BFG before your rivals. (And that is not Big Friendly Giant).

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[slashname3]

Now Populous was fun! Reaching the final level and having access to all the spells!

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[slashname3]

If you want to track the tech tree, watching Connections series on TV would be much more educational.

This particular game has no educational value.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[Hognoxious]

The British one from about 1980, with the bald guy? I loved that!

Or did I?

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[david_thornley]

I think it obvious that games can be educational. The question is whether Civ itself, not any other game, is suited for a school curriculum. I'm not convinced.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[david_thornley]

I'm going to suggest a third alternative: fostering a sort of thinking that would be useful later.

My favorite educational game is Lucas Learning's Pit Droids. It's a series of problems with amusing graphics, and it seemed to me to be tickling my math synapses. I may be wrong about this, but I'd recommend it on that basis.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

Too much speed-clicking for my taste, but otherwise cool. That's the problem with RTS games, it tends to come down to who can scroll around the board and keep track of things at the most frenetic pace, not actual strategy.

The only one I ever played that I thought got the management level right was Majesty. In that one, you couldn't actually control your units, just build them. You could encourage them to go certain places with bounties, but really city structure placement had as much influence over that as your bounties did. So your job was just to build structures and units intelligently.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

That one's really a sort of crypto-programming game, isn't it? I like the idea of those for teaching programming skills. However, I'd rather see ones that are a bit more creative, like movie creators. I like the idea of violent robots as much as the next guy (OK, perhaps a bit more than the next guy...), but they aren't everyone's cup of tea.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

That being said, the most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Always has been, always will be.

Also the most mythical. A real dictatorship is like being forced to support a football team whose coach can never be replaced, no matter how badly the team performs. Sure, sometimes coaches get replaced over things that aren't their fault. But sometimes they just suck.

If you don't have a peaceful way to replace a leader who has become unacceptable to the people, eventually violence is assured. A government run by dictatorship is inherently unstable.

I don't know how you'd model this in-game though. I always pictured my role in the Civ series as sort of the personification of the collective will of the country (which is an evolving but immortal thing). You aren't really the "ruler". That's "Genghis Khan" or whoever you picked at the start.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

I enjoyed the hell out of that show. Still, I'm not sure about doing it in class, as just watching a video isn't all that interactive. It would perhaps be a good project for a kid to make a Civ-style tech tree poster out of an episode or two.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[david_thornley]

There was no violence in the game, just clumsy and amusing droids. My son took to the scenario designer almost immediately.

Re: Eh, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that is the show! It was very good and showed how things happen and are built upon work of others.

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[T.E.D.]

Oh. Not one of those games where robots fight each other then?

Re:Eh, yes and no.

[david_thornley]

No. Pit droids of various head colors, body colors, and tools come from somewhere, and you have to lay down tiles to direct them to their destinations. Some tiles just change their direction, some divert every Nth pit droid, some do things based on head color, body color, or tool. There's lots of puzzles to solve (including a fiendishly difficult one by a friend of mine who worked for Lucas Learning at the time).

Gandhi

[mccalli]

The next generation is going to grow up with a very different view of Gandhi...

Re: Gandhi

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally the truth will be known. We had our first glimpses of the man in the documentary UHF in Ghandi 2.

Re:Gandhi

[Anonymous Coward]

The next generation is going to grow up with a very different view of Gandhi...

that bloodthirsty sonuvabitch.

Wrong game, Grand Strategy FTW in history

[Anonymous Coward]

They chose the wrong game for this....

They could have done MUCH BETTER by using paradox sandbox/grand strategy type games like Europa Universalis, Victoria, Crusader Kings or hearts of iron.

all of these have much better historical start times/locations and allow for actual Alternative Histories. Their technology set up would also be much closer to reality.

Re: Wrong game, Grand Strategy FTW in history

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I find those games more obtuse and less fun than a history book. It takes a certain level of persistence to understand what's going on.

Re: Wrong game, Grand Strategy FTW in history

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a certain level of persistence to understand what's going on.

That's called "learning", which is the goal here. AC is correct that these games would do a better job of stimulating a student's interest and imagination towards different historical periods. They're also great for learning geography since, unlike CIV, Paradox games all take place on Earth.

Re:Wrong game, Grand Strategy FTW in history

[tnk1]

I agree, although being a player of those games, I can't envision them being part of any sort of public school education. There are always going to be people with the needed attention span, but there will also be people who do not have that attention span. They're getting better with the tutorials, but you still need to seriously hit the wikis for them.

That said, Crusader Kings II would have been a ton of fun, especially since it really shows the soap opera aspect of how your court works. Still don't think most kids would be able to handle it. For that matter, most adults either. It's not even a matter of intelligence, those games just require a significant investment in time and interest in detail in order to even play, let alone master.

Aside from all of that... the biggest challenge that the schools have is the need to cater to the least common denominator and follow a set curriculum. They need to squeeze those dates out and get them jammed in the heads of their students or they fail the multiple choice standardized tests.

Explains Graphix Ghastlies

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that explains why the graphics looks like an 10 year old will like them, it is designed for 10 year olds..... :-(

GreekGeek.

THe most important game

[ADRA]

The most important game in my childhood was very educational. It was leasure sui.. you know what? Video games are bad and stuff!

Re: THe most important game

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently that wasn't a spelling game.

Re: THe most important game

[I'm New Around Here]

Whoooooosh!

Games can be educational, this probably won't be

[IRGlover]

As others have said, 'Game-based learning' can be a powerful tool for engaging people in learning and it allows the exploration of different scenarios, cause-and-effect, etc. However, the effective ones are designed to be more like entertaining simulations - that is, the educational aspects are considered first and foremost and the entertaining game elements built around that. Taking an existing game, tweaking it a bit and then claiming that it is now educational is extremely unlikely to work (though, if it makes money for the publisher then they will claim it has been a success).

So

[Anonymous Coward]

"But ma, it's my homework!"

The core of the game is still an RTS, which is educational, to a point. A game like 'Creatures' would cover sociological elements, including the life-cycle and making babies, far better.

.... consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions ...

Don't build shipyards in the desert, or pipelines over cliffs.

... engage in systems thinking ...

Soldiers are built after farms, barracks and weapons factories.

... experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology ...

No: Since the tech-tree is fixed, a player cannot choose between more hospitals or more weapons factories. Nor can they divide resources between work-for-welfare programs or 'lasers on frigging sharks'.

... political and socioeconomic development ...

Diplomacy is saying "nice doggy" until one finds a rock. Or in game terms, additional mechanics giving the human player a first-strike advantage.

Re: LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Quality vs quantity. How powerful is Africa with its starving masses?

What you need, #1981, is more

[Anonymous Coward]

Aqua Velva. Lots more. More. Much more. My God, all of it! Get some more. A lot more. More. Much more.

Tribalism

[zifn4b]

I can't think of a better way to learn the concepts of tribalism and the emergent behavior associated with it. Of course, getting humans to see that at the roots of many concepts is tribalism: nationalism, religion, war, resources and how that's been at the heart of most human activity since early civilization is another thing. We sort of thing we're somehow distanced from that in this time but it's still going on. We don't have to look much farther than politics or getting together on Sunday to support our teams to see it in our living rooms. Perhaps promoting awareness of such things could cause evolution in our socioeconomic systems?

Civilization: a fun game modeled after a real game with significant consequences.

Am I the only one that thinks that "gentlemen" lining up in front of each other with muskets and shooting each other until only one side is left standing amidst bloody corpses is bizarre, disturbing and horrifying?

Re:Tribalism

[Anonymous Coward]

"Am I the only one that thinks that "gentlemen" lining up in front of each other with muskets and shooting each other until only one side is left standing amidst bloody corpses is bizarre, disturbing and horrifying?"

Welcome to humanity. That's even among the milder stuff, historically speaking.

Re:Tribalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Tzu would agree with you. What absurd stratagem.

Captcha: quagmire

Re:Tribalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that thinks that "gentlemen" lining up in front of each other with muskets and shooting each other until only one side is left standing amidst bloody corpses is bizarre, disturbing and horrifying?

Must be fun thinking that, eh? You, all high and mighty, the only civilised, smart person standing amidst a sea of blood-thirsty mindless beasts of humans who would like nothing more than to shoot each other. The other alternative is of course that all those other people want that just as much, only disagree on the best means of achieving such a state, but it's not as gratifying a worldview, isn't it?

Give it up

[Anonymous Coward]

English isn't a dead language. Living languages change over time. New words are invented, old words fall out of use and sometimes existing words take on new meanings. If everyone uses a word or phrase in a particular way, that way -is- a valid usage, even if you don't like it.

Stamping your feet and whining about how everyone else is doing it wrong is the first step toward becoming one of those confused elderly people who doesn't understand how the world works anymore.

Mean-while in Sweden

[aliquis]

"Today children we'll go onto the net and try to find and report as many racist comments as we can"

(It could happen.)

We didn't have Facebook or YouTube. We played C&C, Quake, was on IRC, (no sir we didn't looked at porn.)

Re:Mean-while in Sweden

[packrat0x]

"Today children we'll go onto the net and try to find and report as many racist comments as we can"

(It could happen.)

We didn't have Facebook or YouTube. We played C&C, Quake, was on IRC, (no sir we didn't looked at porn.)

Yes you did. It was in ASCII.

Re:Mean-while in Sweden

[aliquis]

Yes you did. It was in ASCII.

It was on free6. ... well.. was it .se or .com? Guess .com?

free6.com still around, excellent!

Use it to assess politicians

[MrKaos]

If they can't run a city or civilization in a simulation - what chance do they have of running one in real life. Yes, I know people aren't computers, I mean just as a starting point to assess their skills and worthiness to be in office.

Civilization of the Mind

[Anonymous Coward]

"Civilization ... doesn't simulate a population becoming dumb, fat, and lazy."

Canadians can be smug now, but how about the next generation? How long will it be before the US manufactures some reason to virtually annex Canada?

Civilization VI - The mindshare of your Civilization is the new battlefield. Will they rise together in global harmony leading to the precursor of a Star Trekkan utopia? or will they apathetically consume mass quantities of media and resources while decaying their standard of living into a Hunger Games fortress society or Mad Max post-apocalypse?

How will you most effectively manage your population?

• "Propaganda" vs "Education" - Can your citizens think resiliently or are they more easily controllable in unpredictable ways?
• "Corruption" - A negative factor to growth or general progress
• "Corporate Influence" vs. "Government" - Globalization starts out easy, doesn't it? At what cost?
• "Totalitarianism" vs "Communication" - Control your subjects or let them self-organize?
• "Xenophobia" vs "Diversity" - More "Us vs Them"? or can the world C.o.e.x.i.s.t?
• "Apathy" vs "Activism" - Who cares? Kick the can down the road.
• "Duopoly Dial" - Coke:Pepsi vs Water, Conservative:Liberal vs Moderates, 1%:99% vs Widened Prosperity , Religion1:Religion2 vs Secularism, Growth:Regulation vs Sustainability

Re: Civilization of the Mind

[Anonymous Coward]

How long will it be before the US manufactures some reason to virtually annex Canada?

Wait... We haven't done that yet?

*scribbles note*

I think that it's important that children learn

[gijoel]

how easy it is for a phalanx to wipe out an aircraft carrier.

To be honest....

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if this is just a complex push to school systems to buy more overpriced computers when their Core i3s "Civ don't work" on the iGPU.

This will change current historical thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

As children learn that Ghandi is a lying hateful horrible person who will crush your hopes and dreams at the worst possible moment....

Re:Gosh darn it

[Anonymous Coward]

Where?

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

So... when's Quebec's referendum for independence, to shut you up?

better than my school.

[uolamer]

I learned more from Civilization IV and similar games than I ever did in my high school's history classes... That is saying a lot more about my school than using games like this for learning though..

Re:better than my school.

[Mass Overkiller]

+1 I played that game so much, and Leonard Nimoy narrating... Amazing.

Valuable military education, too

[Jogar the Barbarian]

As long as they'll be able to learn that a phalanx can defeat a battleship, it will be all right.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Third time's a charm. I expect to hear from the pea soup eaters about independence again soon.

Improve a child's attention span

[DatbeDank]

And smack them upside the head until they start doing their work. Easiest ADHD treatment.

Our change is better than your change

[jabberw0k]

Naturally languages change over time. Some of us want English to be a better language, with sensible and consistent usage, with precision and grace; and we are working toward that goal. If you wish to campaign for sloppy language, you are welcome to that as well, but it is illogical to campaign for your changes while saying we have no right to seek ours.

Re:Our change is better than your change

[Immerman]

Slashdot is refusing to show the original post, but from context I assume you're defending the "correct" use of "begging the question". Can't blame you - I used to too. But then I realized that not only was I defending a counterintuitive interpretation of the sentence that most people don't use, but one that itself originated with a mistranslation of the original Latin phrase:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:

The term "begging the question", as this is usually phrased, originated in the 16th century as a mistranslation of the Latin petitio principii, which actually translates as "assuming the initial point"

Some language battles are better conceded, for the good of the precision and grace of the language. Not every historical usage is correct.

Educational video games are the best idea

[Anonymous Coward]

since sliced bread.

Games and education

[Iamthecheese]

I fondly remember many hours spent playing Oregon Trail in school but it would be pretty silly to say I learned a lot from it. Come to think of it I didn't learn much from the teachers either. Anyway my point is intelligent courseware can teach kids things, but it has to be way smarter than Civ V. It has to be able to detect a child's level of understanding and continually require additional knowledge to play the game. Not as a condition of being permitted to play but as part of the game itself.

Re:Games and education

[c9brown]

I remember playing a few different games at school. Off the top of my head: Math Circus, The Incredible Machine and we even did a 5th grade project involving Sim Tower. This was all back in the mid-90's. Video games have been used in schools for decades now.

flexibility is important

[swell]

I'm not familiar with the game Civilization but it seems to allow examining cause and effect regarding political and economic decisions. Sounds like fun and a great place to experiment with different ideas. At each turning point students and teachers should look at the results in the game and ask whether it provided realistic conclusions. They should be alert to bias in the game's algorithms (perhaps toward or against the current 'green' climate theories for example).

Unfortunately, many teachers have small minds obsessed with power. They have the answers and their job is to pour facts into the students' heads. I don't recall many of my teachers answering a question with 'I'm not sure', 'I don't know', or 'well, let's look that up'. As far as the teacher was concerned, either s/he knew the answer or the question wasn't worth answering. Textbooks likewise present information as indisputable gospel solid fact. Look at a ten or forty year old textbook and it is full of misinformation with no room for contradiction.

Many answers were wrong. Fifth grade- the teacher's explanation of electricity, AC and DC, was not just wrong, but ridiculous. Yet the tone of authority with which it was given was unmistakable.

Teachers should embrace uncertainty. Rather than shove 'facts' down the students' throats, they should examine different viewpoints, be flexible in their opinions and welcome grey areas and new information. Authoritarian attitudes have no place in education and do not encourage critical thinking.

Re: LOL

[sinij]

Quality vs quantity. How powerful is Africa with its starving masses?

They should have Zulu Warrior rushed the rest of civs when they had a chance.

Hullo, It's Scott Manley Here.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I can say with certainty, that Kerbal Space Program has absolutely been hugely educational and inspirational for some players. Good educational games are games first and the education happens naturally, too many educational titles are the reverse and not nearly as effective.

Read this book

[HBI]

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Loewen gets it right here. I love history, it's one of my degrees, but none of that love came from my primary or secondary schooling. It came from quality works being presented to me by my grandfather when I was young - works that differed from each other profoundly and included the racier details about the past as well.

What do history teachers say?

[Rastl]

I would be interested in the as-unbiased-as-possible opinions of history teachers that are in the target demographic.

Reading the summary it seems like this might be a valuable aid to teaching HOW history works and how X impacts Y. The 'how' is the most important part of learning and what is most difficult to teach.

The price point, the minimum necessary hardware, the time investment, and the quality of everything will determine if there's any integration of this into school curriculum.

If it gets kids interested in learning then it's good. If they use it in place of teaching then it's bad.

Just... no Sid Meier

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave Sid Meier's self-righteous moralizing out of this if possible.

Education going full circle

[Dust038]

We've come a long way from Columbine and Doom. This could work, I am one in full agreement of educational video games. I mean we do have outlets for this for preteens with Leapfrog and...well I can't name the others off my head; I do not wish to stereotype but for the sake of the article using a video game in the education system, the younger generation with exceptions to all ages have their head in a phone or other mobile device for much of the day and night. I just hope it is TouchScreen Capable like Civ V was. My biggest question is how do you categorize a class like this? What degree does it fit into? Politics? Law? ROTC Programs? General Enrollment? From an IT perspective, I have enough users on campus that are inexperienced with other applications that expecting them to learn a video game with this many layers might require a lot of prep time and tutorials. ((I'd be 100% okay with spending time making them)) From my gamer's perspective of years of my life spend on the "One More Turn" life style: There is a learning curve to the game itself that I hope CivEDU addresses for all age groups and turn based strategy competence. Barbarians even with Raging Off, can destroy a novice player if they go unchecked on their land mass, Greece or Atilla will come in and wreck you eventually if you're not paying attention. But I guess this is part of the exercise.

Bad Idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

I specifically stopped playing Civ3 in college because I wanted to complete my education and graduate. Later on I stopped playing Civ4 because I decided I liked being employed vs the alternative. BTW, I am not a big gamer and haven't bought a console or computer game in decades (besides Civ) I am sure there are solid educational reasons for this, but I suspect a few people's educations will suffer overall.

In the snow, uphill both ways

[Hognoxious]

learning by heart a bunch of dates.

Bah! We learned them all in Roman numerals. And then as soon as we'd learned them in Julian they took 12 days out and we had to do it all over again.

On the plus side, there weren't as many of them.

What does this game teach?

[slashname3]

What does this teach the children using this game?

It has very little to do with reality, it does not correlate to current events, it does not match historical issues or events.

All this game will do is teach kids how to manage the rules applied in the game. Those rules do not apply to anything outside the game.

This is a mindless activity for kids to waste a lot of time on during class when they should be learning something that would be useful.

Most likely the new version grants lots of points or success for those gamers (students?) that choose clean energy over other sources, democratic rule over dictatorships, etc.

Waste of money and time. Teach the kids something real like metal shop, wood shop, and how to say "Do you want fries with that?".

Last year I was in a McDonald's and the kid behind the register was having problems because he hit the wrong amount on the register for the cash that was tendered. The manager came over and made change for him and he said, I am not kidding about this, "You can do math in your head?"

All I could do to keep from laughing out loud.

We are doomed!

Simulate This

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can simulate how stupid an idea it was to invade Iraq... So that nobody does something that dumb ever again...

Edutainment? Again?

[thewolfkin]

Are educational videogames a good idea?

Of course educational games can work. Heck I was practically raised on Number Munchers and Reader Rabbit. It's about understanding what a game can and can't do. Civ is a great educational tool. There's a lot of concepts that I learned about in Civilization (1). It's not a great tool for teaching history but it's a great tool for familiarizing students with things like military units, great accomplishments, methods of society interaction (trade, war, etc). It doesn't replace traditional learning but it can make a FANTASTIC supplement to proper learning.

A long time coming...

[BrianJohns]

This is something that should have happened years ago. Good to see it finally happening. A great way to teach macro subjects such as macro-economics, macro-social dynamics etc...

Wrong question

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course, this begs an important question: Are educational videogames a good idea?"

That question is neither important nor interesting. Of course educational video games are a good idea, to the extent that they serve the stated goal of education (and to the extent that "education" refers to something worthwhile like training self-sustaining, productive and independent people).

A question which *is* important is whether video games which train kids to be "leaders" in the hierarchical sense is a good idea. The western world dearly loves hierarchy and order-following, but history and a little critical thought quickly demonstrate that hierarchical control structures are ineffective at meeting people's needs and improving the lives of the many. They're highly effective at meeting the needs and improving the lives of the people at the top, though.

The problem I foresee with this game is that it will probably treat "the people" as mindless animals who do as they're told -- who don't have their own hopes, dreams, goals or passions which are out of line with those of "the leader" -- which is not how reality is, nor is it how reality should be. It trains children with the mindset that the world naturally divides into two categories: Me (the agent of control, with goals and desires), and Everyone Else (pawns to be manipulated into furthering My goals and desires). This worldview won't be promoted loudly by the game, nor will it be highlighted. It'll just be assumed context. But will kids be able to identify and reject that harmful worldview?

Propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

This game is already filled with all kinds of propaganda. I can only imagine how much worse it will get with this "special version."