Having an educator build new sim games from the ground up, particularly something with the complexity of even early versions of Sim City, really isn't practical. The Maxis people did a lot of work to figure out what mistakes to avoid in order to get something that's even playable, but your typical K-12 educator, even one who knows how to program interactive apps, just doesn't have the time to do it.
Tweaking an open source sim game likewise isn't all that practical. How many Social Studies teachers out there would be able to slog through the code and figure out what changes to make to get the desired results? I suppose it only takes one to do it once and spread the news to other teachers, but still...
On the other hand, modifications to these sim games (free or proprietary) that would allow end users to alter certain aspects of the model, that would be awesome.
emailing my congressman gets a fat lot of nothing done.
I've found telephone calls to be rather useful in speaking to my congressional representatives (or rather, the people employed to answer those calls). They get to ask questions to make sure they understand the issue and it's a lot harder for that staff to ignore conversations than the pile of random email, fax, and postal letters, and I'd at least like to think that having that conversation helps those emails on the same issue get noticed.
I hope cost isn't the factor, I'd rather believe it's a marketing thing to create their own upsell opportunity.
And that would be a huge mistake. Expensive add-ons for consoles just aren't successful. There are many examples of this and very few (if any, depending on how you count it) counter-examples. If they do this, can they at least please make the various versions compatable with each other? (PS2 Linux hard drive not usable for games, games hard drive not usable for Linux.)
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Having an educator build new sim games from the ground up, particularly something with the complexity of even early versions of Sim City, really isn't practical. The Maxis people did a lot of work to figure out what mistakes to avoid in order to get something that's even playable, but your typical K-12 educator, even one who knows how to program interactive apps, just doesn't have the time to do it.
Tweaking an open source sim game likewise isn't all that practical. How many Social Studies teachers out there would be able to slog through the code and figure out what changes to make to get the desired results? I suppose it only takes one to do it once and spread the news to other teachers, but still...
On the other hand, modifications to these sim games (free or proprietary) that would allow end users to alter certain aspects of the model, that would be awesome.
Don't you play video games? Zombies are weak against fire and cure spells.