SimCity From a Classroom Point of View

Long, long ago, I played SimCity and absolutely loved it.  I built my city into a thing of wonder and took great care of it.  These days, as a teacher, I teach a unit on urbanisation and figured SimCity could be a great teaching tool for the classroom.  I thought back to my city of years ago and thought of the things that made my city successful - maintaining public facilities, providing recreational opportunities, building transit - and figured that it could work for my students as well.

When I saw that you can download the SimCity app for free for iOS, I decided to give it a trial run myself.  I figured that I could test it this summer and use it next year.  Unfortunately, 24 hours later, I have deleted the game completely.  Aside from the fact that I was putting too much time into nurturing my city, the educational benefits of the game seem really slim.  It didn't take me very long to decide that SimCity didn't really offer much for my students as they study the elements of successful urban design.

SimCity has a couple of flaws in its current iteration that detract from its potential in the classroom.  First, the pacing does very little to encourage people to thoughtfully plan and design a successful city.  Yes, the game does remind any player, but particularly a budding urban planner, that you would need to provide services like water, fire fighting, and energy in order to make citizens happy.  But there is little opportunity to do so thoughtfully.  There is little 'design'; players end up being more reactive rather than thoughtful in their approach to building their cities.

Most importantly, there is a constant demand or encouragement for in-app purchases.  To grow the city or provide services, a user will very quickly need more cash, and the game constantly offers to let you buy more.  Because the 'free' game very quickly becomes a paid game, its potential as a classroom tool is extremely limited.  For an individual student who buys the game, SimCity perhaps offers a lot of learning potential, but for a teacher with 20-30 students, it does not.

As an alternative, this year I used Plan It Green from NatGeo Games, and my students liked it a lot.  It's slower paced and does not have the same set of features as SimCity, but students had a lot of opportunity to think through their cities.  Some of my students continued to play long after our unit was done, nursing their cities into thriving metropolises.  Even though it's more limited, Plan It Green has more potential in the classroom because it's FREE and a teacher can run it with a whole class (as long as there is a good internet connection).

So, though I'm sad to say it, SimCity will not be part of my teaching toolkit next year.