Strategy game Civilization V will soon be conquering classrooms instead, as 2K and GlassLab Games have teamed up to create CivilizationEDU.
CivilizationEDU will be an educational version of the turn-based strategy title, which will be targeting high school students as its audience.
Sid Meier, the creator of the Civilization franchise and creative development director of Firaxis Games, made the announcement at the Games for Change festival in New York.
Civilization V was one of the most critically acclaimed titles for the PC back in 2010, earning several awards along with sales of over 8 million units globally. The basic premise of the franchise has not changed in the past 25 years, with players tasked to build and manage civilizations from the Stone Age all the way to the modern age.
Its educational counterpart, CivilizationEDU, will be tapping into the historical components of the title to provide students with further learnings. For example, students will be able to see historical events unfold in the game, evaluate the ramifications of geography in technological and economic decisions, and experiment with the relationships between the developments of the different aspects of society.
GlassLab will also be adding a learning analytics engine to the educational version of Civilization V, which will be able to keep track of the progress of students and their skills in problem solving. CivilizationEDU can then function as a powerful teaching tool and an alternative to traditional tests, while tapping into the interactive platform of video games that is popular among the youth.
Teachers will be able to access online dashboards on CivilizationEDU, which will contain reports on the performance of students, tutorial videos for gameplay, and instructional resources, among many other things.
"For the past 25 years, we've found that one of the fun secrets of Civilization is learning while you play," Meier said, adding that while players might not always enjoy education, they always enjoy learning, whether they are young or old.
CivilizationEDU will be launched in 2017 through a variety of distributors. The next installment in the long-running strategy franchise, Civilization VI, will be launched for the PC on Oct. 21.
CivilizationEDU is a much more meaningful update that will be coming to Civilization V, compared to a recently release mod that allows players to take control of Donald Trump as the president of the United States.
GlassLab is also the producer behind the educational edition of Minecraft, which saw its early access program for teachers launched last month.
