Background:
This is a blog designed to focus on a new teaching technique that we created over the past decade. We feel it is time to explain our program to the general public and share our experiences. The primary goal of what we do is to create a living virtual world through which we teach social studies content to our students. This isn't just a simulation which has a short goal and takes only a few days to complete. This is a complete methodology which requires "out of the box" thinking on the part of the teacher with the goal of having students live a lifestyle for 180 school days. We believe learning needs to be a creative, fun and applicable process. Reading and writing are very necessary but the need to critically think is just as important and this is where we feel Civlab provides an invaluable tool.
Teachers that participate in this program teach middle school and high school. We teach a range of students from those with IEPs, 504s, grade level, honors, and Advanced Placement. We are all located in the state of Maryland but in different counties, Washington and Montgomery respectively. All of our classes are between 58 to 47 minutes in length.
Tech Tools:
The main program we use as our foundation is Civilization 4 BTS. It serves as a virtual map, a logistical tracker of macroeconomics, and an interface where classes interact with each other. We have adapted much of the XML coding and some of the DLL coding to enable us to manipulate this game into a teaching tool. We don't allow the guidelines of Civ4 to restrict how we apply it as a teaching tool. Instead we create our own functioning MOD used by many teachers / classes so that when we need to apply a concept we can do it instantly. We also can add too this MOD or take away aspects from this MOD as we coordinate our teaching.
We assign each class a country in the civ world at the start of the school year. We focus on keeping most of them in America or Europe based upon our content and will generally reset the year and boundaries. We use a accurate world map we have designed with countries we have put in place (Civ4 has preset nations and locations. We adjust these to be correct for the modern world). Since this is a living process we allow "spill over" from year to year. Ex. If the class that is France ends their year in tremendous debt that debt gets "inherited" by the next class in the next school year to a certain degree (along with all subsequent inflation, etc).
Process:
Accountability is everything in order to ensure participation and create the correct learning environment. Each of our participating teachers uses a slightly different method, but in short success in the lab is tied into the students grade.
Our daily lessons are designed to connect what we are learning about to the situations the students experience in the lab as they interact with other nations. In short they can engage in literally anything that is in the real world (minus drug cartels - although wine running became a thing this year instead of opium during the Opium Wars). Classes can deal with issues as simple as a diplomatic or fiscal policy decision to full scale nuclear war - deterrence problems (although we try to avoid this because it is very destructive...and in our lab America always loses).
On the whole we might actually look at the actual Civ4 program in class each day for a period of 2-5 minutes on average. The rest of what we do is within the "normal" scope of teaching lessons. Civ4 is just the program that allows those decisions to come alive with consequences. It is a fun experience to see a class apply their content with "expected" results only to have those "expected" results suddenly run into road blocks as they clash with the goals of two or three other classes.
We can successfully implement a 1770s to 1860s United States History course at the same time as a World History Course, AP Economics course and U.S. Government courses. Although our content is different we can coordinate as teachers the crossing points of our content via Civlab so that a War of 1812 happens near to the same time as WWI for different classes in a different part of the state. Every class learns and applies its content within the "vision" of civlab that they have at that time.
This coming year we are going to work on adding some cross county collaborative projects which were very successful in the 2012-2013 school year as students applied what they learned by working together through Civlab....more on this later.
Our success in pushing the envelop and developing typical education skills along with content understanding using this system has been outstanding. We are adding to what we do every year and intend on sharing out our experiences in the 2014-2015 school year.
Just to give you a general idea of what you will see, on the whole in a single day Civlab allows us to teach the following content successfully to our students...
1. Geography
2. Macroeconomics
3. Government - Legislative, Executive, Bill to Law process
4. US History
5. World History
6. Current Events
7. Global Economics
8. Geopolitics
Ex. We are talking grade level students debating the Macroeconomic issues of raising taxes verses borrowing money. Successful debate with both accuracy and passion inside of a process of using Congress where we are making real laws for Civlab (thus teaching the Bill to Law process)that students care about. Then when a third of the Senate doesn't get their way they stand up and state they are going to filibuster causing a major uproar within the class, forcing the other Senators to demand to invoke Cloture and the President to get mad at all of them. This then hurts us in the Civlab so that they either compromise or we suffer the consequences.
There is literally no better way to learn how real world politics or even historical politics have worked than to live the experience. Not only is this process invaluable for the critical thinking but when taken and applied to a DBQ covering a similar matter then depth of understanding and analysis is greatly enhanced. You know you have nailed it when students can immediately draw a parallel from Civlab to what we just learned or read about in our content.
I'm sure I have left out a few things that my colleagues will add to this. This doesn't include the DBQs, High School Assessments, etc that we strive to have students fulfill but we will discuss these in later posts.
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