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

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.