The River City Project

[Skip Zilla]

Are you folks aware of The River City Project? Although I have no hands-on experience with it, it seems worth investigating. I learned about it in a Tweet on Twitter about fifteen minutes ago from Scientific American magazine, which lead me to their online article which includes it in a discussion of learning science virtually.

Here's how the Graduate School of Education at Harvard begins its introduction to this project:

With funding from the National Science Foundation, we have developed an interactive computer simulation for middle grades science students to learn scientific inquiry and 21st century skills. River City has the look and feel of a videogame but contains content developed from National Science Education Standards, National Educational Technology Standards, and 21st Century Skills.

[Connie Weber]

Skip, as always, you are posting stellar resources... thank you, thank you!

[Ian Carmichael]

Yes, Skip. Me too, I'd far rather see real exposure and experience for anybody. Simulators and simulations are fine to a point, but they are never as rich as the real world, nor as rewarding. (I have been disappointed by every one that I've investigated.)
But then, simulation isn't the real world. Which reminds me of the modern philosophy debates about illusion. Where pre 20th century philosophers were happy to airily say 'In principle the human mind can be deceived by clever enough illusion.' it's now far more common to see comments that it is impossible to provide 'clever enough' illusions - because the amount of information we need to mimic the real world is the amount we need to duplicate the world. (We may fool humans with 30 fps as motion, I read recently that video doesn't fool octopus until about 160 fps, and I hear that to bamboozle an eagle requires 3000 fps or so.) Necessarily simulation falls flat.

I recall an episode of Lois and Clark where a vritual reality is constructed, but it could only be sustained for a very short space of the streetscape: a very clever 'teaching moment'.

[Skip Zilla]

Ian, can you imagine a youngster first getting an intuitive/cognitive grasp of physical or biological phenomena before it's later expressed in a conceptual/mathematical construction--experience and perceptual experimentation (in this circumstance, virtual) before analytical thought and reflective synthesis? I'd rather real than virtual exposure to natural phenomena as a foundation to personal scientific "discovery," but certainly some exposure is better than none, and in the best cases, the explorations conducted in a virtual world may actually lead many more to exploring the real one it simulates.

[Skip Zilla]

It occurred to me, too, Ellen--although not primarily--that if kids are going to play video games for hours, many of them full of militant behaviors, why not see if they might enjoy exploring and building virtual worlds which leave them with certain scientific concepts and understanding actually useful in the real world. A sarcastic detractor living in yesterday's educational mindset might quip, "Wow! Learn and have fun, too! That'll be the day." But the coming of that very day may spare us the unsustainability of both a scientifically ignorant and violently perverse future.

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Skip,
I'm going to see if our junior science folks will give this a run...

[Ellen Pham]

Fascinating, Skip... and what a beneficial paradigm shift away from war games (which, from my experience with my two boys as they entered and went through puberty, were engaging, and led to in depth parent/ child conversations, like, Chucky, get off that damned warcraft, you've been on for two hours!), to more life enhancing scenarios. Plus, it appears to help close the "achievement gap", which might be at least partially called the "self-perception gap". I'm going to check these games out myself, and I have close to zero interest in computer games. It will be interesting to see if girls respond to this way of learning in the same way as boys. From my experience, girls have been much less interested in games like warcraft, but I haven't kept up with the interest in games like second life (thankfully, my boys grew out of their computer game phase).