Urban planning with SimCity

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_4-_Rush_Hour_region_view — 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.

Da Hood-4 Mar., 041286566223 — 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.

Da Hood-18 May., 041286566502 — 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.

Right hand “man”

Lunch on Wednesdays follows our main block of Student Run Business time. It’s after they’ve delivered pizza, prep-ed for a week of bread, completed finance and its reports, prepared and processed order forms, and sorted out the plants.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve started having my students discuss the business over lunch (including finance reports presentations) and it’s turning into a regular board meeting.

Today they started assigning seating.

We usually sit around two long tables set end to end, with the main supervisor on one end and myself at the other. Today the main supervisor started laying out plates and positions. Pizza supervisor to his right, bread to his right, finances one down from bread and sales across from finances. Everyone else could find their own spot.

I was a little surprised at this unprompted expression of hierarchy. Pizza is our most involved part of the business and the core of the the enterprise so its supervisor, P., has a very important post. She was placed on the right hand of the main supervisor!

I asked the main supervisor why he did it. He said, “I don’t know.” I even had to explain the meaning of the term, ‘right hand “man”‘.

It ended up with the supervisors at one table and everyone else (and myself) at the other.

Except for the plants supervisor. Plants have been going slowly, lately, including some seedling failures. The plant supervisor sat all the way down the table, next to me.

…

I can feel it in my bones that there are some interesting lessons in all this. From organizational structure to non-verbal communication.

But since we’re dealing with positions around a table, and we’ve been talking about the importance of place in geography, the best context to discuss this right now might just be one of the importance of geography and place in the interactions among people.

Google Maps: Zooming in to the 5 themes of geography

[googleMap name=”Memphis, TN” description=”35 N, 90 W” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”1″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35, -90[/googleMap]

Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.

If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.

terrain — Terrain view shows the vegetation changes very nicely.

The physiographic regions really stand out with the continent-scale satellite view.

Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.

highways — Transportation networks are an essential component for understanding the geography of a city.

hi-riv — The rivers are a little more visible in terrain view.

Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.

Highway bypass loops are often significant demographic boundaries.

As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.

city-v-ag — Human effects on the urban environment are very different from agricultural regions.

At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.

[googleMap name=”River port” description=”River port” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”15″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35.0895, -90.106[/googleMap]

You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.

Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.

So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.

themes-of-geog-Memphis — Graphic organizer for Memphis geography showing examples from all the five themes.

Financial reports and statistics

Sally, our school’s business manager, was kind enough to come in last month to help the financial department of the student run business organize its books. It was long overdue. We’d been improving our record keeping over the last couple years, but now we have much more detailed records of our income and expenses.

This is great for a number of reasons, the first of which is that students get some good experience working with spreadsheets. We use Excel, which in my opinion is far and away Microsoft’s best product (I’ve been using OpenOffice predominantly for the last year or so because, it improved quite a bit recently, and I’m a glutton for certain kinds of punishment.) I’ve been surprised by how many students get into college unable to do basic tables and charts, but hopefully this is changing.

The second reason is that the Finance committee can now use the data to give regular reports; income, expenses, profit, loss, all on a weekly basis. I expect the Bread division to benefit the most, since it has regular income and expenses, offering students frequent feedback on their progress. We’re now collecting a long-term, time-series data-set that will be very nice when we get to working on statistics in math later on.

In fact, we should be able to use this data to make simple financial projections. Linear projections of how much money we’ll have for our end-of-year trip will tie into algebra quite nicely, and, if we’re feeling ambitious, we can also get into linear regressions and the wave-like properties of the time series of data.