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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?
"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?
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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
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.
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>
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?
We'll make great pets
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.)