Seriously. Where the hell was this when I was a kid? You might be asking, “What’s CivilizationEDU?” and it’s a good thing I’m here! Professor Ragachak’s here to provide an education! In 2017, Take-Two Interaction is teaming up with 2k and Firaxis to bring something called CivilizationEDU to High Schools across America. What does that mean? CivilizationEDU will use the Civilization game engine to let students create historical moments, analyze them and think about them critically. They will use it to evaluate the geological and technological ramifications of the decisions they make. Civilization is a 4x strategy game where you play as one of many historical factions and set forth with the ultimate goal to reach space. You start typically in a period where man first begins to have the wheel, fire, et cetera, and grow through the passage of time.
Civilization helped foster my interest in history and the effects our decisions have on the rest of the world. Your successes and failures teach valuable life lessons in the Civ franchise, and though they can be [to some] markedly unfair, I don’t think that will be the case in this version of it. The goal of CivilizationEDU is to teach, and I wonder if it will be available to non-students. I genuinely think I will enjoy looking at what it has to offer. Teachers who utilize this will have a dashboard that provides reports on student progress and much much more. It will contain gameplay guides, lesson plans, and one of the big ones to me, shows how in-game achievements can relate to problem solving lessons. I love it. I. LOVE. IT. Where was this when I was a kid? As technology improves, so do we create a myriad of ways to teach kids. There’s more to learning than just reading a book and answering questions. CivilizationEDU’s going to really change the way we as a people look at education. A majority of players who absorb themselves in the Civilization franchise play for more than the challenge, or the engaging mechanics; they also learn at the same time. The ability to create these military, socioeconomic, political and technological issues within a video game, and allow students to explore solutions to them will be phenomenal.
