New 'Civilization' Game Will Be Sold To Schools As An Educational Tool (technobuffalo.com) 198
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?
"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?
the obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Quality vs quantity. How powerful is Africa with its starving masses?
They should have Zulu Warrior rushed the rest of civs when they had a chance.
WTF is happening (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re:WTF is happening (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2, Informative)
"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 th
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I was taught that our hills and valleys are basically what happens when glaciers carry sediments to a location and their melting creates rivers that carve up the landscape.
Moraines and such, you know? If that's wrong, blame my teachers.
Re: (Score:3)
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 [history.com] on the History Channel. I wish there was something similar for world history.
Re: (Score:2)
And by the way: Thank you for concentrating on the important part of my post. Appreciated.
Re: (Score:2)
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 Stoc
Re: (Score:2)
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
That's the thing: How history as taught to schoolkids is and has always been completely political. Its about teaching kids the "proper" foundational mythology. If that makes it so whitewashed that its boring, more's the better. Then kids won't go off on their own and learn about the bad things their ancestors did (or worse yet, their government is still doing).
On the plus side, the result tends to be so boring that kids don't actually learn much of this BS. I think kids are actually a lot smarter here th
Re: (Score:3)
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'
Re:WTF is happening (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
No, I'm saying that not matter what you teach, lots of people will accuse you of indoctrinating their children with politically motivated lies, and since there's no objective way to decide whether that's true or not we err on the side of caution, so you can't teach much of anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, Civ is a simulation. History can be boiled down to dates and events and other boring crap that has nothing to do with life.
But that's the scholastic view of history, which makes it absolutely worthless to anyone. History isn't about dates, names, places and events. It's all about the leadup - how did the events of World War I lead to the Nazi uprising? Why did normal German citizens do nothing about the Nazis?
Yes, it's somewhat important to know the dates of WWI and WWII, but those are facts,
In the snow, uphill both ways (Score:2)
Bah! We learned them all in Roman numerals. And then as soon as we'd learned them in Julian they took 12 days out and we had to do it all over again.
On the plus side, there weren't as many of them.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 prog
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking of that before I even read the last sentence.
I once took over some stuff from a guy who couldn't code "test at the top" loops and "test at the bottom" ones. I forget which way round it was, but you can imagine what a mare's nest it was. Flags & conditionals for whether or not it's the first cycle, auxiliary counters that are one more or one less than the proper counter would be...
Re:WTF is happening (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that history has facts that certain people find uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, secession was primarily about slavery, and when the war started the Union was primarily fighting to reestablish the US more or less as it had been. Lincoln was anti-slavery, but he was also a politician, and knew that a war to end slavery wasn't going to be particularly attractive. He made the Emancipation Proclamation for its diplomatic effect, as it pretty well prevented Britain from direct intervention
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
I had a good history teacher in HS.
He had us play game, on paper, to learn important concepts.
For example, we did a stock market game. Despite everyone KNOWING that the Crash happens in October of 1929, none of the players were in a cash position come October.
Drove the point home that in a bubble, no one sees the bubble, even with perfect knowledge.
My son is lucky enough to have a equally talented history teacher who demonstrated exactly how bad the Black Death was and how it was spread.
And a math teacher t
Re: (Score:2)
Blimey, Gunner Graham. If you're saying that history is complicated and full of unexpected consequences, butterfly effects and unknown unknowns[1] to the extent that it would be almost impossible to simulate a decent portion of it[2] in a game I'm right there with you.
[1] Like some berk with a head like a haybale conning everybody into doing something retarded.
[2] As opposed to just a small subset - military and/or economics, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm from what I've heard called "the Oregon Trail generation" (late gen-x / early millennial), and some of our teachers "got it" (e.g. using the eponymous software I just mentioned, along with Number Munchers, LOGO programming, Hypercard, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm a true millenial. I mean, who has Facebook and youtube while they still went to school, only millenials (and later generations) have that. Our teachers were nothing close to millenials though. They didn't know how to handle computers. Nor did they know how to appease a class. In fact some pupils even openly demanded from the teacher to open internet access (he had an admin console at the teacher computer which allowed this), and some teachers even did.
The younger teachers who did know how to handle
Re: (Score:2)
(And because getting a commodore 64 to boot over a network was.... traumatic)
Traumatic? I would have thought impossible. Please explain how one sets up a Commodore 64 to "boot over a network". I grew up with a C64 and I don't remember any such capability. There was a serial port which could support up to a 1200 baud modem as I recall, but no capability to boot over the modem. In fact, the computer's "operating system" (essentially a BASIC interpreter) was in the ROM memory, and didn't even need to boot from the disk.
Re: (Score:2)
No it wasnt anything as fancy as that. It was some sort of interfac
Re: (Score:3)
A lack of self-discipline has nothing to do with using a simulation game as a prop for teaching.
Re: (Score:2)
If a teaching prop requires the student to have a certain amount of self-discipline, and the student does not have it, then using that prop with that student is counter-productive.
Re: (Score:2)
How does that improve his performance?
If you fail at your job, in this case making the student learn, surely your compensation should reflect that?
That is odd, seeing how I'm arguing for raising smart - or at least educated - kids using the most efficient method available, rather than letting th
Re: (Score:2)
FB and YT? Did you graduate HS last year?
Re: (Score:2)
No, but close. I graduated this decade. I don't really know how I came to this site and not ended up with reddit or something :).
Re:WTF is happening (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
What's wrong with Typing of the Dead? "Type faster or the zombies will eat you" is a great motivator :).
Re: (Score:2)
I just tried it. It's better than the typing exercises that were inflicted upon me as a kid... transcribing nonsense like 'ask a sad dad lad had gad' and on and on to infinity. My typing speed was always poor on such things because it's gibberish. The zombie game is better, although it has kind of an odd and repetitive dictionary... I've just typed the word 'xylem' more times in one game than I have in the rest of my life. My one problem with it is that it still doesn't give me a coherent sentence to ty
Re: (Score:2)
Are you new to this?
Seriously, schools these days are run for the benefit of the administrators first, and the teachers second, the children are somewhere down in the double digits I suspect. For any changes in teaching you probably need to look at the question of 'will this reduce staff numbers, or make dealing with the teachers union easier' because those are the two primary questions.
We are seeing 5 and 6 year olds coming home proudly telling mummy that they have been 'learning mindcraft' at school today
Re: (Score:2)
IMHO you've mentioned the fundamental problem just by naming the management structure. In other places with better outcomes you don't have the American fantasy of a manager who can run anything but instead a very experienced teacher who knows how to run a school effectively.
Re: (Score:2)
What's happening?
A company is trying to eek out a bit more profit from a six year old product that's at the end of it's sales life by remaking it as an educational product.
This is just a press release from that company. It's not a policy or endorsement from the Department of Education. It's not something that anyone is doing today. It's just a company hoping that someone will buy their product.
Chill out already.
Re: (Score:2)
STFU noob.
Mathblaster was awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be interested in what changes they make. I see some potential in teach lessons.
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something,
That certainly dates you. We played computer games all the time.
In 5th grade I wanted to have the absolute top score in some Math program. I ended up putting it on a floppy drive, taking it home, figuring out how it stored the 'high score' data and Kobayashi Maru'd the results.
Give the Civilization a decent API and let the kids set up bots and automatic governing.
Re: (Score:2)
> Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.
I think that's more the fault of the administration than anything else. Why are the computers even able to reach Youtube or Facebook? That should be blocked by policy or firewall. Hell, when I was in school the computers weren't even networked. People were either doing the lesson plan or nothing at all.
But all that aside and to answer the original question, I do think there is a plac
Re: (Score:2)
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
"Back when you were in school" people were on Facebook and Youtube? "Back when I was in school" we were playing Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, etc, and it was entirely possible to learn with a computer. Maybe the problem now isn't the computers, maybe the problem is that kids don't know how or don't want to learn.
Re: (Score:2)
well, for some of us the time suck was Lemonade Stand, ...
... loaded off a cassette tape.
Re: (Score:2)
"Today children we'll go onto the net and try to find and report as many racist comments as we can"
(It could happen.)
We didn't have Facebook or YouTube. We played C&C, Quake, was on IRC, (no sir we didn't looked at porn.)
Yes you did. It was in ASCII.
Of course... (Score:3)
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Excellent! Whatever tool works. I learned all this at home; computers in school were nowhere near as educational, probably because activities on them were more directed. Although I'm also a big fan of taking the computer and TV away for at least a summer or two, so that books and activities are the only entertainment available...
Re: (Score:2)
There is a whole generation of kids who learned English as non-native speakers through video games.
It'll teach an excellent lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
... and then Gandhi nukes you.
Ok seeing as decline and fall is popular (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
They can teach about Gold Rush era USA to cover that. It seemed to work out pretty well in the long run IMHO.
Civ 5's economic system is based on gold... (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's opinionated, prejudiced, and arrogant, I'd say. The kicker, I think, was when the AC accused economists as a whole of being incompetent on the basis of his favorite book on the subject.
Also because it's a flagrant attempt to graft the AC's nonstandard ideas into a game that isn't really designed to showcase them. It would be possible to write a game that was educational about the history of money, I suppose, but that would be best done by designing a new game.
Freeciv is better for suited for school (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Maybe the base games, but they're talking about making a specific educational version. Presumably that will have more information / differently structured gameplay to expose particular facet of history / etc. Freeciv doesn't have that.
And anyway, graphics do matter. Firing the imagination is a great motivator for learning, and that's harder to do if your game looks like arse.
Eh, yes and no. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
I don't think anything on the computers really helps learning these concepts any more than textbooks and handouts did before them. At least, not to the extent of the money spent on all of the tech.
If kids don't want to learn, blinking lights and synthetic music won't change that. Computers just give another way to avoid actually learning.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely true, since the dawn of civilization to its end.
But for the ones who do want to learn, why should we force them to grind through page after page of painfully dry and largely useless factoids when they could learn it experientially and enjoy it via a game? The Indian campaign of Alexander the Great began in 326 BC. After conquering the Achaemenid Empir [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it obvious that games can be educational. The question is whether Civ itself, not any other game, is suited for a school curriculum. I'm not convinced.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not terribly convinced that Civilization ... is a particularly good choice: it is 'history themed'; but fundamentally designed around being a fun game;
I was just playing it a bit last night. Still a fun game. But other than a little blurb on the start screen when you pick your Civ, there isn't a lot of real history content. I guess the tech tree does enforce the point that all inventions are built on the foundation of previous ones, but you could do that just as well by tacking the tech tree poster to the classroom wall, and moving on with your life.
Note that Civ VI is coming out this year. So my guess for what is going on here is that they know from pa
Re:Eh, yes and no. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Too much speed-clicking for my taste, but otherwise cool. That's the problem with RTS games, it tends to come down to who can scroll around the board and keep track of things at the most frenetic pace, not actual strategy.
The only one I ever played that I thought got the management level right was Majesty. In that one, you couldn't actually control your units, just build them. You could encourage them to go certain places with bounties, but really city structure placement had as much influence over that as
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to suggest a third alternative: fostering a sort of thinking that would be useful later.
My favorite educational game is Lucas Learning's Pit Droids. It's a series of problems with amusing graphics, and it seemed to me to be tickling my math synapses. I may be wrong about this, but I'd recommend it on that basis.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There was no violence in the game, just clumsy and amusing droids. My son took to the scenario designer almost immediately.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. Pit droids of various head colors, body colors, and tools come from somewhere, and you have to lay down tiles to direct them to their destinations. Some tiles just change their direction, some divert every Nth pit droid, some do things based on head color, body color, or tool. There's lots of puzzles to solve (including a fiendishly difficult one by a friend of mine who worked for Lucas Learning at the time).
Re: (Score:2)
The use of historical flavor helps keep things from feeling like you are just playing a spreadsheet(at least
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, the most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Always has been, always will be.
Having played those games before, it was strategy to change the form of government at the right time to match the phase you were in to get the advantage.
Ended up being mostly about advancing through the tech tree as quickly as possible so you ended up with the BFG before your rivals. (And that is
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, the most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Always has been, always will be.
Also the most mythical. A real dictatorship is like being forced to support a football team whose coach can never be replaced, no matter how badly the team performs. Sure, sometimes coaches get replaced over things that aren't their fault. But sometimes they just suck.
If you don't have a peaceful way to replace a leader who has become unacceptable to the people, eventually violence is assured. A government run by dictatorship is inherently unstable.
I don't know how you'd model this in-game though. I alw
Re: (Score:2)
This particular game has no educational value.
Re: (Score:2)
The British one from about 1980, with the bald guy? I loved that!
Or did I?
Re: (Score:2)
Gandhi (Score:5, Funny)
THe most important game (Score:5, Funny)
The most important game in my childhood was very educational. It was leasure sui.. you know what? Video games are bad and stuff!
Re: (Score:2)
Whoooooosh!
Games can be educational, this probably won't be (Score:2)
Tribalism (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Use it to assess politicians (Score:2)
If they can't run a city or civilization in a simulation - what chance do they have of running one in real life. Yes, I know people aren't computers, I mean just as a starting point to assess their skills and worthiness to be in office.
I think that it's important that children learn (Score:2)
better than my school. (Score:2)
I learned more from Civilization IV and similar games than I ever did in my high school's history classes... That is saying a lot more about my school than using games like this for learning though..
flexibility is important (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with the game Civilization but it seems to allow examining cause and effect regarding political and economic decisions. Sounds like fun and a great place to experiment with different ideas. At each turning point students and teachers should look at the results in the game and ask whether it provided realistic conclusions. They should be alert to bias in the game's algorithms (perhaps toward or against the current 'green' climate theories for example).
Unfortunately, many teachers have small
What does this game teach? (Score:2)
It has very little to do with reality, it does not correlate to current events, it does not match historical issues or events.
All this game will do is teach kids how to manage the rules applied in the game. Those rules do not apply to anything outside the game.
This is a mindless activity for kids to waste a lot of time on during class when they should be learning something that would be useful.
Most likely the new version grants lots of points or suc
Edutainment? Again? (Score:2)
Of course educational games can work. Heck I was practically raised on Number Munchers and Reader Rabbit. It's about understanding what a game can and can't do. Civ is a great educational tool. There's a lot of concepts that I learned about in Civilization (1). It's not a great tool for teaching history but it's a great tool for familiarizing students with things like military units, great accomplishments, methods of society interaction (trade, war, etc). It doesn't r
Re: (Score:2)
It raises an important question, if it does anything. #thatisntbeggingthequestion
Actually, for once, it can really be construed as a proper begging of the question in this blurb - although I suspect it is purely accidental on the part of the author.
Our change is better than your change (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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/... [wikipedia.org]:
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 lan
Re: (Score:2)
' Imagine a future where people fondly reminisce about the school-days and the fun they had in the classroom'
There's a wonderful short story written by Isaac Asimov in 1951 called 'The Fun They Had', set in the far future when all education is home-based and completely computerised. It's just as relevant today as it was then.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, although being a player of those games, I can't envision them being part of any sort of public school education. There are always going to be people with the needed attention span, but there will also be people who do not have that attention span. They're getting better with the tutorials, but you still need to seriously hit the wikis for them.
That said, Crusader Kings II would have been a ton of fun, especially since it really shows the soap opera aspect of how your court works. Still don't thi