SimCity to teach SimMaths and SimScience at school

Hot on the heels of news that a Swedish school has decided Minecraft is a great way to teach its kids town planning, games giant Electronic Arts (EA) has does the same by announcing SimCityEDU, a version of the game that embeds the USA's Common Core standards for school curricula in the game. EA’s clearly aware of President …

[jake]

::adds the word "simcity" to the incoming resume/c.v. auto black-hole listie::

Thanks for that tip, ElReg :-)

[Pascal Monett]

"what will a SimBoss make of a SimCV?"

Simple, he'll hire and pay in Simoleons.

[Lee Dowling]

Re: "what will a SimBoss make of a SimCV?"

And he'll end up hiring Simpletons.

[I think so I am?]

It is dumb

but I learned a lot from computer games. How to kill a man silently with a golf club and how even being bald I can dress up in any thing and know-one will recognise me; also a good spy always carries a cardboard box.

Having poor grammar wont even stop me because All your base are belong to us!

And when a drunk person is swaying in the street, if I go close and then ""back,down,back, BP(close)" I will rip out their spine while a massive red FATALITY descends from the clouds and a benevolent voice calls out "flawless victory"

Also jumping and firing a Rocket launcher makes me jump higher even to the point where I glitch out of the universe, take that physics.

[Synonymous Shepherd]

Re: It is dumb

If you do get fired from your SimCareer, you can always revert to the last checkpoint.

[Lee Dowling]

Re: It is dumb

"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

But, yeah, you don't learn from software unless you've learned from elsewhere first.

I work in schools. Secondary schools now literally have interactive multimedia DVD's with animations of bunsen burners because the kids can't be allowed real ones. You can even get chemistry software where you tip beaker of substance A into bowl of substance B and it goes "boom" and fires the virtual beaker across the virtual room when you happen to create a particularly bad reaction.

Life really is that pathetic these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It is dumb

Who needs first aid, when to recover from an injury all you need to do is eat or inject/apply a stimpack. Even in the middle of a battle.

And you can carry a cart load of items, yet that last gem will slow you to a crawl.

Don't worry about car insurance, you will just bounce off other vehicles and objects. Don't worry about tailgaters - a banana skin sorts them out.

[rory dobson]

Wonder if...

...the .edu version will be free from the horrendous DRM that the general release version appears to be saddled with?

From what I've read, punters cannot play off-line (at all, as in ever), cannot install on multiple machines they own, and are forced to play in a persistent multiplayer universe with other punters affecting their citystate. Add in no save and revert option, and no matter how good the simulation, the real world reviews (i.e. not the leaching gaming press) are going to be looking grim.

So bright side up: this edition could be the only thing that turns a profit for this version of SimCity.

[JDX]

Re: Wonder if...

A massive persistant online world? What a daft idea, nobody would want a game like that.

The problem might be that you're expecting it to be SC2000 with better graphics, rather than a modern game... WOW doesn't have offline mode either. OTOH it might just be crap, I need to read more to decide.

[mittfh]

Re: Wonder if...

Easy: Just use SimCity 4 Deluxe. Despite being nearly a decade old, the user communities are still very much active and user generated content is still being created. There are at least two unofficial expansion packs (NAM - Network Add-on Mod - is the most popular, while if you design big cities, you may like CAM - Colossus Add-on Mod - which adds a whole bunch more growth stages). It's not unheard of to have multi gigabyte plugin folders, so if you chuck enough UGC at it, it will crawl even on modern PCs (oh, and don't forget to save regularly - the more UGC you have, the more likely it is you'll encounter a CTD - crash to desktop - typically after spending three or four hours developing a city while forgetting to save en-route...)

[John 120]

Works...

13 years ago, SimCity 2000 was responsible for me passing Business Studies, crack on EA!

[Irongut]

The important question is...

When does the new SimCity come out???

I've been wating a very long time since the last one.

[mittfh]

Re: The important question is...

Sometime this year. But frankly, if you're a fan of SimCity 4, don't bother. No terrain editing (other than automatic levelling when plopping a building). No local saving (everything's saved in the cloud). No offline mode (many of the economic aspects are calculated in the cloud). Although not allowing mods on release is fairly standard, the fact that so much is done in the cloud probably means no mods will be allowed full stop (unless they're purely eye candy, replacing an existing structure).

SimCity 4 Deluxe is, however, very much alive, courtesy of the user communities, with plenty of additional content, mods and even unofficial expansion packs available (and being continuously developed). There's even a total conversion project under way: SimMars.

[MrZoolook]

The irony here...

... is that, being EA, you need a degree level education to read the licence agreement. And after that, a cryptology major to input the DVD key. Then you need a well paid job for a year, just to be able to buy a computer powerful enough to run the 18 anti-piracy technologies in the background before the game even runs!

And you better be sure you wanna play it, because un-installing it 'completely' will take you to retirement.