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.

Luring vultures

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).

Unfortunately, it did not seem to work.

Learning to work in a group

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:

Mushrooms, in detail

beautifv — Image from World of Technology: Beautiful Shrooms.

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.

We have fish!

While we were working on the needs of living things a couple weeks ago, we acquired two fish; goldfish, fifteen cents apiece.

It was supposed to only be a mental exercise. If you put a water plant, Egeria densa in this case, in an enclosed jar and left it in the sunlight, the plant should use the carbon dioxide in the water to produce oxygen during photosynthesis. A similar jar kept in the dark would produce carbon dioxide and use oxygen as the plant respired.

Bromothymol_blue_colors — Bromothymol Blue pH indicator dye in an acidic, neutral, and alkaline solution (left to right). Image and caption from Wikipedia.

That was the practical part. Students measure the pH of the water before and after a day in the light and dark. The pH of the jar in the dark should go down as the added carbon dioxide makes the water slightly more acidic. Bromthymol blue solution in the water changes color very nicely within the pH range of this experiment, but, in a pinch, you can also use the pH color strips that are sold for testing aquarium water.

My students did the experiment, made their observations and came to conclusions. Then the lab activity asked them to think about what would happen if you put a fish into each of the jars, to see if students are able to extrapolate based on a well rounded knowledge of respiration and photosynthesis.

My students did the mental experiment, but the next day our two fish turned up, uninvited at least by me.

I’d anticipated something like this so I’d picked up a small fish tank at a yard sale over the summer. I’m not opposed to keeping animals in the classroom, as long as I don’t have to take care of them. Fortunately, since we’re studying life, keeping organisms and attending their needs is something the kids are learning and there is no better way to learn that via practice.

Our fish are surviving. The students have added some gravel and structures to provide habitat. The waterplants, still in there to provide oxygen, seem to be thriving despite some browsing by the goldfish.

One of the few rules is that anything added to the tank should have some purpose to help support the needs of the fish. I’m also encouraging the students to think of ways of maintaining conditions in the tank which would minimize their work. Hopefully some filter feeders, maybe small clams, and similar organisms will turn up and we can talk about ecology. I may have to nudge them in that direction though.

I’m not sure what the fish’s names are as there seems to be some controversy among the students. With a little luck they’ll survive until we start comparing religions. Two years ago we had a frog who passed away at just the right time for us to have to figure out what religion he/she was so we could perform last rites.

And no, I did not kill the frog.

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.