They had just looked through all the civic buildings and zoning options before they took the outside option, so they started with SimCity’s basic introduction to urban planning concepts.
The group chose to locate their city on the ocean, with a river. Previously, when the class had looked up and down the U.S.’s eastern seaboard in Google Maps, we’d noticed that most of the bigger cities, like New York and Charleston were on or near estuaries. (We’d also noticed that most of the cities were protected by some sort of barrier from the direct influence of the oceans.)
[googleMap name=”New York City” description=”NYC on the river and ocean.” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”8″ mousewheel=”false”]New York City[/googleMap]
This group gained some significant advantages over just playing the computer game because the sandbox model allowed them create features not built into the game.
In particular, they sculpted an earthen dam with a hydroelectric power plant, that was the centerpiece of their city.
By putting a dam across the estuary they could acquire both fresh water reservoir and hydroelectric power.
It’s probably not unfair to guess that the idea for the dam came primarily from our visit to the Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Plant last year. I say so because the eight grader who came up with the idea was reminiscing about last year’s immersions for the rest of the day.
The decline and fall of Apocalypse.
The group did a great job, although they did site their landfill upstream of their reservoir. This became a problem because after they presented to the class they turned on the river. We relearned the biblical lesson about not building on the sand. This was not entirely unexpected though; the students had named the city Apocalypse.
The combination of computer simulation and physical model really worked well. So much so that two years from now, when I do this again, I think I’ll require at least one group to do the physical model. But it really worked for them to have at least seen the computer game so I’ll have to build that into the project too.
Renaissance Faire Elf Using Cell Phone. (Image by Zoomar). The caption for the photo is priceless, 'I just want to state for the record that a cell phone at a Renaissance Faire is anachronistic and wrong. Being an Elf, however is 100% historically accurate.'
What are the fundamental needs of life (as we know it)? Energy, water, living space and stable internal conditions. These are physical needs of all organisms from bacteria to plants to mammals. Humans share these needs too, and this was one of the things we talked about in natural world this cycle. However, in social world studies we also discussed how people have psychological needs that, as far as we can tell, are different from those of single celled organisms: celebration, community, entertainment, and, among other things, what my students call understanding, which includes religion and spirituality.
My technophilic students also interjected that we, humans, have a need for electronics.
Electronics? My first thought was that they were being facetious, and they may have well been. But as we talked about all the other needs during our synthesis discussion last Friday I began to realize just how fundamental electronics have become to life as we know it.
Electronics are tied into the way we meet those fundamental physical needs. Organizing shipping and distribution of food requires complex scheduling software and databases. The operation of the pumps that extract our groundwater and deliver it to our houses are controlled by microcontroller. With MRI’s and computerized records our health and well-being (maintaining those stable internal conditions) are increasingly influenced by electronic technology. And in our homes, the elegant knobs and dials of thermostats on furnaces and ovens are giving way to smooth if inelegant digital displays.
Even our understanding of the world we live in, of the effects of global climate change for example, is based predominantly on sophisticated computer models and confirmed by computerized satellite systems (see NCAR for example).
So have we reached the point where electronics are a fundamental need of society, and how long will it be before we as individuals become inseparable from our electronics devices? Are we all cyborgs now? And the ultimate question: Should we be teaching more electronics in middle school?
The SimCity game is a wonderful model for urban planning. My class is using it to try to tie together the lessons on the Needs of People and the Themes of Geography.
I gave the small groups the game, two hours, and required them to take notes on why they made the choices they made.
SimCity regional view.
What we did
The game starts at the Region view, where you choose the location of the city. I was enthused to see the groups almost instinctively go for a location with good access to water. Of course almost all the places you can found a city are on a river or ocean, but more than one student specifically mentioned the water access as a reason for their choice.
To have them better think about the region, I also asked the students to think about, and report, on where in the world they thought their city might be, based on the topography and the vegetation. Most proposed the eastern U.S. seaboard.
After choosing a location the students could “terraform” it by raising mountains, making valleys, sculpting beaches and more. Some groups needed to be chivvied to move on, after all, they only had one two hour session to complete the assignment.
Then they got into the heart of the game, Mayor Mode (the terraforming session is called “God Mode”). The urban planning model is based on the land-use zoning strategy used by many, but by no means not all, U.S. cities. You have to mark cells on the city’s grid for residential, commercial or industrial/agricultural use. Then, if you’ve provided utilities and a transportation system “developers” will autonomously start to build houses, businesses and industry in these zones.
The great city of Da Hood. Note the different areas for urban, commercial and industrial development, and the seaport on the river.
Playing on “Easy”, the mayoral advisers would regularly pop up to suggest new amenities, like schools, police stations and parks that would attract more people to the city.
And students had to make choices. One of the first, for example, was about what type of power to provide their city. Coal plants are cheap but dirty, while windmills produce a lot less power so you have to build a lot of them.
A Little Discussion
The game worked remarkably well as part of the curriculum. SimCity is a potentially addictive game, the plea, “I really need to stop,” was heard repeatedly as I was trying to get the last group to come to our discussion. Yet, two hours was enough for students to get the gist of the game and think about its implications for geography. The final cities were not perfect (at least one was designed to be dysfunctional) and most of them were running a serious deficit, but when it came time to present, students were able to flesh out our information on the lessons quite nicely.
The game is also easy enough. The game’s internal model is quite sophisticated, but there’s enough in-game advice, that it took just some initial guidance about the basic premise of zoning, for students unfamiliar with the game to play it effectively. Some students were better prepared at the start than others. Some had played similar games in the past and one student had even read the instruction booklet that came with the game CD, but they were all able to get cities up and running in the allotted time.
Technical Difficulties
We’re a Mac school, but SimCity does not have a version that works with modern macs, so I had to use my old laptop that has Windows. That computer is a Mac that it uses Boot Camp to boot to Windows, and, perhaps for this reason, the first group that tried to use it had it crash on them a few times at the beginning of their game. They gave up and created their city in our sandbox, which turned out great in the end because it gave them more flexibility in the structures they could create and some interesting differences in perspectives from the game based presentations. I’ll post more about that later.
In Conclusion
I like the game because it lets the students provide the infrastructure while the game engine/model tests the infrastructure to see it if works and “predicts” development and population. The Needs of People and Themes of Geography contexts were useful ways of getting students into the game but struggling to get the city to work helped fill in a lot of things that students had not thought of previously.
One of those things was people’s need for safety. In our post-game discussion, safety from crime and from nature came up as additional needs of people we had not discussed. Successful cities in the game need police stations, and students had apparently been thinking hard about the array of natural disasters they could rain down on their cities when the assignment was over.
The Taj Mahal, soccer fields and a skate-park (of which some of us were inordinately proud) met the needs of citizens for recreation and understanding.
Finally, students presented their cities while Ms. Ann DeVore from the Deargorn Heights Montessori Center was observing the classroom. Ann is an enthusiastic user of SimCity. Her middle school uses it the initial part of the Future City competition, which is something I’d very much like to get my group involved in as soon as I can wrangle some technical advisers.
The theme for this term’s Independent Research Project is Life on the Nature Trail, and my students are required to do some actual field work on the species or taxonomic group they’ve chosen to investigate. One students chose vultures because they saw one in the clearing just outside the trail and we’ve occasionally caught sight of one soaring over the campus.
He’s been trying to lure one in for a closer look.
Since I’ve vetoed the idea of leaving fresh meat out, unless he finds professional to guide him, he’s asked for permission to lie out on the grass pretending to be carrion.
I let him take the camera (see above).
Today we saw one swoop past during P.E., so we took a couple minutes trying to lure vultures (see below).
I’m not terribly partial to the Island of Podiatry exercise where student produce a map of physiographic features, gulfs, archipelagos, plateaus and so on, starting with the outline of their feet. However, in considering alternatives I was thinking about how it could be made even more real, more tactile. My first thought was of having them sculpt the topography out of modeling clay, but then I realized that this would be a great use for our sandbox.
The weather’s cooled down a bit in the last week, but it should still be warm enough for students to want to be outside. All I’ll need to do is level the box (though this might be no small feat since it’s filled with sand), add about ten centimeters of water, and have them shape the island from their Island of Podiatry map. I’ll also probably need them to decide whose map they want to model.
[googleMap name=”Lake Titicaca” description=”Example of a lake.” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”7″ mousewheel=”false”]Lake Titicaca, Peru[/googleMap]
Cuing off of a comment by EV from Somewhat Up in the Air, I finally found what I think is a decent alternative to the Island of Podiatry map exercise. Instead of them altering a map of their feet into a series of topographic features, I’m having them do a treasure hunt using Google Maps. The assignment is pretty straightforward, and students can choose either option:
Use Google maps to capture images (Apple-Shift-4) of the features on the topographic features list. Put all the images into a PowerPoint or similar presentation. You may choose features from anywhere in the world so make it interesting.
In addition, I’d like to set up one of those games where they get extra points if the location they choose for a particular feature is not the same as someone else’s.
Another addendum to this, which would make a great extension to the project, is to allow students to enter the geographic coordinates of their features on a webpage that then plots all the similar features on a Google Map. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but would take some time as I’d have to set up and program its own website for the project along the lines of the Mariner AO site described here.
Woolley says she was surprised to find that neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the intelligence of the smartest member played much of a role in the overall group intelligence. Social sensitivity – measured using a test in which participants had to identify another person’s feelings by looking at photographs of their eyes – was by far the most important factor. – from Frankel (2010), Social sensitivity trumps IQ in group intelligence.
I’ve been thinking that it would make sense to have specific lessons on how to work in a group. Montessori students do a lot of group work and should be quite practiced at it by the time they get to middle school. In an increasing complex and interrelated world the ability to work in diverse, interdisciplinary groups is increasingly important, which makes it pertinent to consider and adapt to research on group intelligence.
The key research finding from this recent paper is that the “intelligence” of a group depends most on the sensitivity of members to the feelings of others, which is called social sensitivity. Individual intelligence of group members have little if any impact on the effectiveness of the group. Good social sensitivity of group members allowed everyone to contribute to the benefit of the group.
Apparently, women tend to be more socially sensitive. If this research holds up then we’ll have to consider how to teach social sensitivity to everyone. We already try to teach students how to behave and interact in a group; letting everyone have a chance to speak, for example, is another sign of good group intelligence. But to become more socially sensitive, students need to become more aware of others’ feelings. It’s something we already try to convey, and most of our students are aware if it, yet I can’t help but think that they might benefit from a full, Montessori, three-part-lesson on how to work in a group.
The lesson would probably fit best into the orientation cycle when we talk about community building, or maybe I can tie it into the Personal World curriculum next cycle. There are differences between small group dynamics and large community interactions that may make separation of these two topics important.
NPR also had a good story on the research paper mentioned above:
Sometimes beauty is in the details. The World of Technology blog has a wonderful collection of close-up images of mushrooms. One of my students is working on an Independent Research Project on the fungi on our nature trail. Hopefully this might help spark the imagination.
