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Strategy studio Firaxis is bringing one of its most successful titles to the classroom thanks to a new partnership.
The developer has teamed up with educational tech firm GlassLab, which previously adapted games including SimCity and Plants Vs Zombies 2 for use as teaching tools.
The collaboration will offer CivilizationEDU, a modified version of 2010’s Civilization V, to American high schools later this year.
CivilizationEDU includes features such as a learning analytics engine to track students’ progression and an online hub for teachers to work on lesson plans. Developer diaries, tutorial videos and other resources will also be made available.
“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 engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development,” GlassLab and Firaxis said in a press release.
“CivilizationEDU is a perfect example of how games can be used to teach and assess key 21st-century skills that are hard to measure on multiple-choice tests,” added Connie Yowell, CEO of Collective Shift and LRNG, which is merging with GlassLab.
