Using Civilization 4 in the geography classroom

A colleague of mine and I are developing a scenario for C4 in the geography classroom. We are trying to reinforce the ideas associated with religion's affect on culture. We are having some difficulty with the following ideas:

We would like to make sure that the spread of religions follow a mostly historical trajectory. (i.e. we would like to make sure that the Chinese do not convert to Judaism, etc)

Is there any way to control how civilizations adopt certain religions or predetermine which civs found each religion and then greatly restrict the further adoption of other religions?

Thanks,

Steve

In the unmodded game, I don't think there's much of a way to do what you're asking. I believe RFC follows historical religions, but I've never really played it.

(The RFC gurus should be along shortly to offer better advice.)

I think the game is far too randomized to allow for this, even RFC: sometimes, it works out great, but sometimes, Jerusalem gets razed and Europe goes Buddhist.

What this is good for, in Geography at least, is analyzing settlement sites - you can discuss wet points and dry points, access to food, fresh water, defensive features, and the like. You could even create a start, and ask your students where the best city site on the map is, keeping in mind river, hill, and resource proximity.

If you really want to use this to create a realistic image of religion spread, you may need to hardcode the religious process - which I have no idea how to do.

I would be very careful with such ideas. While generally it's useful to find methods which appeal to the kids, the center of our lessons should be to pursue and achieve the educational objective we set for the lesson. The educational objective should be concrete and precise, and the methods we use should adapt to it, not the other way around. In your case the central question might be in what way the world religions spread. If you want to use visual material you might check out some videos like this one. The topic itself is of course huge and could easily be used for a whole teaching unit.

The problem I see with using Civ 4 is that the game models human history in a fairly abstract and therefore inaccurate way. Particularly the game's aspect of culture spread does not relate to real history all too well and may in fact be rather misleading for the students. That's not to say the game can't teach elements of history, it certainly can. But in a school lesson the level of precision should definitely exceed that of the game.

That said, I have thought about using Crusader Kings 2 to exemplify the vassal system of the middle ages in my history classes. But even there, with a historically much more accurate game than Civ, I have my gripes with using it. Until now I haven't come up with a didactical justification for using it over other available material on the topic. And even if I did, it's not enough to say I want to use it, I would have to think exactly how I intended to employ it in class and if it was really a good way to reach the diversity of the kids.

Then again, if you do come up with convincing answers to the didactial questions involved, please let me know. My intention is not to douse creative ideas, rather to bear in mind the awareness to the corner stones of what constitutes a good school lesson.

@OP, I cannot speak for religious influence, however the map in my sig is my variant of Earth18Civ with greater emphasis on geographic precision.

Did your RL Civ experience the "our game designers have invented a new version of Civilization", and you chose "this has great educational potential"?

If I could play civ in social studies class, that would be my favourite class. It is regardless anyhow, but still

Thanks for the input. That makes sense. Now that I think about it more, C4 does seem too open ended to control the religions in this way.

Is it possible though to suspend all research within the game?

whsgis said:

Thanks for the input. That makes sense. Now that I think about it more, C4 does seem too open ended to control the religions in this way.

Is it possible though to suspend all research within the game?

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If you turn your research rate down to zero with the rate modifiers in the upper-left hand corner, it would take few hundred turns to complete most technologies.

@whsgis: what do you mean by suspending all research? Your own or everyone's?

whsgis said:

A colleague of mine and I are developing a scenario for C4 in the geography classroom. We are trying to reinforce the ideas associated with religion's affect on culture. We are having some difficulty with the following ideas:

We would like to make sure that the spread of religions follow a mostly historical trajectory. (i.e. we would like to make sure that the Chinese do not convert to Judaism, etc)

Is there any way to control how civilizations adopt certain religions or predetermine which civs found each religion and then greatly restrict the further adoption of other religions?

Thanks,

Steve

Click to expand...

Like the others suggested, you are going to get a much more "realistic" outcome if you start with RFC. Is this the only goal you are trying to accomplish, or do you have other objectives you are trying to accomplish with your mod.

The problem is, though, you are taking a game abstracted from reality and then de-abstracting it. Just like if you translate Star Wars into Chinese and then back into English, inevitably there will be some errors and I'm not sure how good of a teaching tool it would be.

Funky said:

That said, I have thought about using Crusader Kings 2 to exemplify the vassal system of the middle ages in my history classes. But even there, with a historically much more accurate game than Civ, I have my gripes with using it. Until now I haven't come up with a didactical justification for using it over other available material on the topic. And even if I did, it's not enough to say I want to use it, I would have to think exactly how I intended to employ it in class and if it was really a good way to reach the diversity of the kids.

Then again, if you do come up with convincing answers to the didactial questions involved, please let me know. My intention is not to douse creative ideas, rather to bear in mind the awareness to the corner stones of what constitutes a good school lesson.

Click to expand...

We've had long discussions in the World History subforum of the OT world on Dark Ages and Middle Ages historiography*, and as it turns out the prior ideas we have about feudalism are pretty incomplete and in some cases completely wrong. CK2's game mechanics are largely based around this incomplete understanding, so it is fortunate that CK2 hasn't found its way into your classroom yet.

*: I'll apologize if you have already read them but I don't remember your name from the threads. Figured I'd offer it as an advert because the OT doesn't get as much traffic nowadays and the WH subforum even less.

I don't think that even RFC-DoC would be useful for history students. Actual history is much, much more then technological competition between policies and military conquests of one policy by another, and that's really what Civ gameplay boils down to.

Playing basic Civ or RFC would be useful for someone with no knowledge about history at all AND a liking for strategy games. But even in this case, it works better at the level individual hobby, not a classroom setting.

First of all, thank you to everyone for their input. This forum is so responsive it is amazing. I need to clarify our goal a bit though.

This is not a history class. We will be trying to use it in World History too but after our initial pilot in Geography. I think that there are probably quite a few scenarios on the forum for use there.

I am trying to accomplish a very narrow objective. I just want to model the diffusion of religion. I am visualizing a 20-30 turn game with only two civs with pre-assigned religions. Then the students would use various ideas from the game like missionaries, state religion and sacred sites to learn about real-world religious concepts. I want to make it a competition but only in the sense that we can process later how various decisions lead to the faster and more complete diffusion of religion and what that diffusion did for those societies.

UnforcedError said:

@whsgis: what do you mean by suspending all research? Your own or everyone's?

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I mean everyone's research. Can I make it impossible to discover anything new for all civs, effectively suspending research?

You can set the game to Marathon. Or perhaps mod the tech tree so that techs take more than 30 turns to research.

Crippling upkeep would also do the trick

I thought I should give an update on our project. We are about to take the students into the lab to do the tutorial for C4. We will then introduce them to the first scenario a couple classes later.

The essential question we are trying to answer in this first lesson is, "What role do resources play in development?"

Students will be assigned one of two civs. One is resource rich and the other resource poor. After playing this 100 turn scenario they will reflect on the experience by tying the ideas from class on development to the game. They will also record the demographic data from the end of the scenario. This data will then be recorded and given back to them to analyze.

Please feel free to try this simple scenario out. It is definitely a beta version and needs to be cleaned up a bit over the next two weeks. If you have any suggestions for changes I would love to hear them.

Thanks again for your expert advice.

Steve

That is truly awesome! Well done!! I miss there had been forward thinking teachers like you when I was in school. Good luck on this project, and dont hesitate to give more feedback on how much the students like it. Awesome!!

I'd be extremely dubious about using this game as some sort of educational primer frankly. While Civ 4 draws on historical concepts, it is very broad and woefully inaccurate to be used as some sort of simulator. You could inadvertently give your students a very warped sense of historical progression.

Willem said:

You could inadvertently give your students a very warped sense of historical progression.

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That doesn't happen already?

Personally I'm skeptical about teaching methods which just draw kids more into gazing at screens, as if they don't spend enough time doing that already. Would this exercise not be better done by setting up the classroom with two sides, one rich in "resources" (pens, books, whatever) and one poor, and actually getting them to talk and negotiate with each other instead of just dumbly seeing stuff move around on the screen?

However, I would say the story of the development and marketing of Civ 5 would make a great topic for classes in economics, psychology, business, or philosophy