Educational SimCity to teach children about environmental issues

Maxis’s city-building sim is being adopted into US classrooms, and aims to teach child about pollution and its knock-on effects
A specially created educational edition of SimCity is to be released for schools next month.

SimCityEdu: Pollution Challenge! will be released on November 7th to a selection of US schools for grades six to eight, and will give pupils the chance to be mayor of their city and decide how to tackle environmental issues.

As well as environmental issues, such as traffic congestion and pollution, pupils will also have to deal with employment and housing needs as they attempt to keep their citizens happy.

This special version, based on Maxis’s 2013 SimCity, has been a collective effort by GlassLab, an educational video game lab set up last summer by the Institute of Play, EA and the ESA.

SimCityEdu will be included in curriculum plans and comes equipped with teaching guidelines for classrooms.

“[GameLab] are taking the software, and they are able to take the time and energy to focus it just for educational uses,” said SimCity creative director Stone Librande. “They can go into our interfaces and change them around, and custom-tailor them to a certain age range of kid, for a certain classroom setting and lesson plan that they've devised.”

http://www.develop-online.net/news/e...issues/0184876