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!!!

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]

"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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

Gandhi

[mccalli]

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

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!

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).

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?

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.