We're proud to announce the Cities: Skylines Education Edition in partnership with TeacherGaming

[TheLetterZ]

We're happy to announce a partnership with TeacherGaming to launch an educational version of Cities: Skylines. The new teaching tool is available today to schools globally through the TeacherGaming.com storefront and as part of the company’s game-based learning subscription service, which offers K-12 lesson plans and learning analytics.

The educational version of Cities: Skylines includes eight custom-made lesson scenarios, touching upon topics from sustainable city planning to active citizenship and the Human Development Index. Along with lesson plans and student progress tracking, the game also includes in-game tutorials customized for the classroom environment.

“Transitioning our games into teaching tools that make learning fun and interactive is something near and dear to our hearts at Paradox,” said Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive. “We chose TeacherGaming to help structure our games for the classroom, because this is a new field for us and they have the right experience and knowledge to do it right.”

“Paradox Interactive titles turn niche topics like civics and serious history into unexpectedly entertaining experiences that educators will fall head over heels for,” said Santeri Koivisto, TeacherGaming CEO. “Committing to such an unconventional portfolio means Paradox is combating prejudices about the very nature of video games, and that’s also what we have been out to do for the past six years. In that sense, and many others, this partnership is a perfect fit.”
For more information on the educational version of Cities: Skylines, visit https://store.teachergaming.com/games/cities-skylines.

About TeacherGaming
TeacherGaming is a Finnish educational technology brand that aims to elevate teaching and learning by harnessing the power of video games in the classroom. TeacherGaming Desk, the company’s flagship product, is a subscription service platform that combines nearly 40 hit games children know and love with ready-made lesson plans and curriculum-aligned learning analytics. Since its launch in July 2017, it has reached nearly 5000 teachers and institutions around the globe.

This was announced through our PR a few hours ago but a forum thread is in place so that you all may discuss, celebrate or anything in between right here on our forums!

 

[muttonnoir]

Great to see this development. The game is an ideal teaching and learning tool

 

[Nussor]

What exactly will Cities be teaching? "From construction to balancing budgets and passing policies, your students get to wield the tools that can make or break their vision for a 21st century utopia." That's quite a far stretch. The only thing Cities simulates really well is traffic, while the zoning system is horribly outdated (both from an actual planning and gameplay perspective) and the budgeting seems to make no sense whatsoever; same with crime and demographics. Well, at least it got me into watching some city planning youtubes.

 

[TheDungen]

Cool!

 

[CPTBlunden]

This sounds great, I made a session of English language camp for Russian kids and teens which was basically Cities: Skylines on paper, this year I'm delving into TTRPGs and other stuff, I wholly support this initiative.

I am curious to see what direction this takes with Cities, I'd like to be able to play a game in another language but be able to hover over words and phrases to get a tooltip with the translation in my native language (in my case English), though I understand the constraints on such an approach

 

[Ben59mar]

It should be also an architect/landscape software (with mods however) I mean, look on YouTube (strictoaster, keralis, fluxtrance, two dollars twenty and others) what we can do with just that game!, it’s sooo wonderful, realistic and well thought and it’s even simulated!!

 

[dj97]

What exactly will Cities be teaching? "From construction to balancing budgets and passing policies, your students get to wield the tools that can make or break their vision for a 21st century utopia." That's quite an overstatement. The only thing Cities simulates really well is traffic, while the zoning system is horribly outdated (both from an actual planning and gameplay perspective) and the budgeting specifically seems to make no sense whatsoever. Well, at least it got me into watching some city planning youtubes.

I agree. This game isn't as detailed or well-simulated as people think it is. By closely analyzing the game and how it behaves, you'll discover that the game is quite shallow. Not enough to be a tool for real-life urban planning, I'm afraid.

 

[CookieMonk]

I think this is a grand thing you are doing Paradox and C.O.i salute you.

 

[sprites]

it's not really my thing but ... cool i guess?

 

[Axe99]

Very cool - great work Team Colossal Order/PDX

 

[MarkJohnson]

I agree. This game isn't as detailed or well-simulated as people think it is. By closely analyzing the game and how it behaves, you'll discover that the game is quite shallow. Not enough to be a tool for real-life urban planning, I'm afraid.

I think you guys are overthinking this. It's for grade school kids (K-12.) I think it would be more designed to the basics of what it takes to run a city. Like what things need to be done, what taxes are for, the management of everything and how things interact with each others.

I think it will help C/O as well, so they can make games better and more realistic by applying it to a more real world environment. I know I quickly found through my teaching assistant days for GED classes, just how much I didn't really know. It's tough teaching someone something and explain it so they understand. You quickly learn you don't know things as well as you thought you did. Good thing they made me get a one-year teaching certificate to be a TA, that mostly consisted of teaching students with learning disabilities. So, I'm sure the devs will learn a little something more to apply to the game in the future. It should be a win, win for everybody. but mostly for us gamers. lol

 

[adil3tr]

I'm sorry but this game isn't a good simulation of a city. I've purchased it and I love Paradox but it's just not. Maybe if the expansions go in a new direction but that seems to not really be the intent of the game. I didn't like Simcity 2013, but it just was a better simulation of a city and more educational in how it did most things (crime, education, health, scaling up, etc). High school kids are capable of playing fairly advanced games and I'm saying that the underlying systems are not that accurate. This game is a city sculptor more than a city builder or city simulation. The only exception is the traffic system.

 

[EricTheGreat12]

Besides for traffic, public transit and parks, there is little to no depth in this game at all. You do not care about what your citizens think, you can maintain taxes at 11% as anything more makes people leave your city, and crime is a mechanic that adds nothing to gameplay. You shouldn't have to implement council meetings, but you should make the player care about the citizens living in his city. Otherwise, you are just painting lines for roads and trying to diminish traffic for hours at a time.

Cities Skylines is still, nonetheless, a great game that I enjoy playing at home. But as an educational tool it is a flawed concept: you want to teach about ground and sea pollution, yet it's as simple as moving buildings away from each other; the recycling centre is just another Incineration Plant that produces little raw material. Crime, which has a major impact on the cities of today, presents no challenge to the player. Colossal Order has been unable to improve fundamental parts of city building, yet it deems the game suitable for educational purposes. I think that this is a bad idea to do without actually making the game realistic in the first place, and I don't think that this will do well in the long term.

 

[MarkJohnson]

This is for children to have basic idea of city functionality.

What would you add to make it more suitable for a TEACHING TOOL? Not play as a game.

I think too many are focused on game play, instead of as a teaching aid.

 

[EricTheGreat12]

This is for children to have basic idea of city functionality.

What would you add to make it more suitable for a TEACHING TOOL? Not play as a game.

I think too many are focused on game play, instead of as a teaching aid.

Yet they didn’t need to downgrade the game mechanics in order to better help young children. Doesn’t it bother you to a certain degree that the game isn’t hard enough?

 

[MarkJohnson]

Yet they didn’t need to downgrade the game mechanics in order to better help young children.

Downgrade? Exactly where did they downgrade anything? I've only seen upgrades every update.

Doesn’t it bother you to a certain degree that the game isn’t hard enough?

It's very hard if you try. Have you built a 25-tile modless city of 1-million. or as close as possible. I got 655k before I gave up from updates throwing my cities into chaos.

Did you enable hard mode? It sounds like you filled the game with workshop and zipped through it by passing the rules of the game and got bored because the mods made it too easy?

But you still didn't address what you wanted to see implemented in the game to make it better/harder.

 

[Kain2K]

I agree with everyone who thinks that CS:L ist not really suitable as a game for teaching the basics of city development.
Like someone else already mentioned, crime, the plague of our time, has nearly no impact, and one or two police stations are all you need to virtually eliminate every criminal in your city. Garbage management is a no brainer once you have the incineration plant, since you can just burn all the trash, something that is not possible at all in reality. Every Cim will become the new Einstein eventually, even if you're not having enough schools in your city.

The only thing it does well is its traffic simulation, and even that is all but well implemented. Cims are to dumb to use every available lane, so roadbuilding centers mostly around that issue. So, what are you teacheing those kids? That there is no need build a road with more than one lane in both directions, because your citizens ain't using the extra lanes anyway? That you only need a handfull of police stations to litterally anihilate crime in a metropolis? That everyone will become a supergenius eventually, you just need enough schools? That you can solve all our garbage issues if you just build enough incinerators?

Don't get me wrong. CS:L is a good game, it is fun to play, for a time, but it is not a good simulation. As many flaws as SC13 had, the simulation was one of the few things that worked. CS:L wouldn't have had a sliver of a chance, if SC13s agent system wouldn't have had those design flaws.

I mean, it should be quit easy to adress the most flaws.
Crime should always be a thing, even if every second building is a PD. Not every Cim should go all the way to university by default. Having not enough schools should have a real impact, as far as I could see in my last cities, it still has no impact aside from happiness. Incinerators should only be able to eliminate a certain percentage of trash. And in regards to the onipresent traffic issue: Cims should be more inclined to use that second lane, on which they also can make that left turn they need to take to go to the mall. Because at the moment, if there is more than one possible lane, they just use one. That is neither reallistic, nor an intelligent behavior.

So, to make it short: it's nice that you think your game is able to teach children the basics of city planning, but I really think you are a bit overconfident in your game. Especially since it still has elemental flaws in its simulation and serious issues in regards of realism and depth.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I think your overthinking this. This teaching aid is for children. They just need the basics. Garbage collection, recycling. Water supply, sewage treatment. Crime and jails. Grade schools, high schools, colleges. Power plant. oil, ore, solar, dams, nuclear. Taxes, budgets, etc.

I don't understand while children need more than these basic tools? It's not like this is designed for civil engineering class in collages or universities.

FYI, SC2013 only failed because of 1 tile cities. Nothing else really matters. But no one got over tiny one tile cities that you complete over a weekend at tops. City builders want large cities that takes months to build, not days.

I think the SC2013 agent system is way superior than what this game offers. It's way too crippling on the system and introduces death and a crazy job tracking system. So many thing were sacrificed in this game solely on this complex tracking system. SC2013 could track over 100,000 agents on it's lowly 32-but architecture and single core system and no permanent residence system. This game can't even manage 80,000 on 8 cores and 64-bit.

But SC2013 had potential to be a way better city builder than it was. Stupid EA push too much on it and it collapsed under its own weight. It's been 5-years now. maybe they'll surprise us and bring it back since they've had their typical 5-years development time.

It'd be nice to see either SC2013 Education Edition or C:S Education Edition in action. But I imagine it's very expensive.

 

[ristosal]

The only thing it does well is its traffic simulation, and even that is all but well implemented. Cims are to dumb to use every available lane, so roadbuilding centers mostly around that issue. So, what are you teacheing those kids? That there is no need build a road with more than one lane in both directions, because your citizens ain't using the extra lanes anyway?

Well, maybe these kids will learn the basic connection between city planning and traffic behavior better than you then. People who complain about this are usually only seeing the tree instead of the forest.

 

[EricTheGreat12]

Downgrade? Exactly where did they downgrade anything? I've only seen upgrades every update.



It's very hard if you try. Have you built a 25-tile modless city of 1-million. or as close as possible. I got 655k before I gave up from updates throwing my cities into chaos.

Did you enable hard mode? It sounds like you filled the game with workshop and zipped through it by passing the rules of the game and got bored because the mods made it too easy?

Why are you assuming that the game I’m talking about is modded? I’m talking about the base game, you know it’s what we and the children have access to right?

You completely missed the point last time so I’ll write it differently:

The base game is assumed easy enough for children to use. Does it not worry you that it isn’t harder enough, that it would actually be a challenge to implement a learning tool?