(Credit: Electronic Arts)
SimCity is set to become an education tool with in-game classes to teach students a wide range of subjects on a practical level.
With the new and long-awaited SimCity game set to arrive on 5 March, Electronic Arts has teamed up with the Institute of Play's Glasslab to create a set of learning tools to be deployed inside the game.
It's a clever move; games are increasingly understood to have great potential as an experience-based learning tool — something that makes education fun, engaging, accessible and memorable in a way that memorising formulae is not. And SimCity is already educational, teaching its players about infrastructure, resource management, provision of amenities, budgeting and more.
Calling the toolset SimCityEDU, Glasslab hopes to see teachers and developers integrate the game into the classroom. According to the press release:
Educators will be able to create and share digital SimCity-based lesson plans that will encourage students to think critically about the challenges facing modern cities. In the classroom, SimCity will be more than a game — it will be a way for the next generation of leaders to hone their skills through urban planning, environmental management and socio-economic development.
So, uh, can we go back to school?