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

[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.

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.

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.

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!