When my primary school briefly explored the possibility of an educational video game, their choice was decidedly uninspired: Myst. Most of the kids hated it, and the teachers could barely understand it.
Today, I wish I was back in primary school — because nuking Gandhi just became a legitimate school activity.
It’s all thanks to CivilizationEDU, which Take-Two, Firaxis and 2K has just announced will be released next year as part of a bid to bring Civilization 5 to North American high schools. It’ll be a modified version of the iconic turn-based strategy game, focusing on the opportunities for critical thinking, analysis, planning and the way various societal systems interact.
“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,” the companies said in a press release.
The move is part of a partnership with GlassLab Inc, a not-for-profit developer which has produced a range of educational spinoff titles, including SimCityEDU.
According to the release, teachers will be have an online dashboard with which they can produce reports following their students progress. The reports will also include “how in-game accomplishments relate to problem solving; developer diaries; gameplay tutorial videos, and instructional resources.”
CivilizationEDU will be available as a digital download next year, but only through specialist services and not traditional marketplaces like Steam.
Comments
6 responses to “Nuking Gandhi Might Be A Legit School Activity Next Year”
Anything has got to be better than Math Blaster.
Honestly, the CIV series legitimately helped me learned lotsa stuff when I was young. Its a good candidate for being an educational game.
I sunk a lot of time into Civ 2 when I was younger. My parents originally tried (and failed) to get me to stop playing. After a while. they realized that it was actually really educational. Instead, they forced me to read the historical descriptions that came with every new building/wonder/unit/etc. For me it was a small price to play to keep playing, and I learned heaps about the Great Library of Alexandria and Leonardo’s Workshop.
Bank that gem in the strategy bank. Frankly, I just want to play civs, doesn’t matter what the students want – my classroom went down the autocracy progress path.
The ingame Civipedia used to be great, but more recently most of the historical fluff has been stripped out. I don’t think it’s been quite the same since Civ3 iirc.
guess i was lucky for once, we got sim ant, sim city 2000 and sim farm, and then Descent when i installed it on the all the Macs in one of the computer rooms