IN THE CITY: EA's announcement of SimCityEDU had us nerds understandably going a little bonkers. According to the Verge, it will be a "learning tool for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and the game's curriculum will conform to U.S. Common Core Standards." We immediately reached out to GlassLab (an R&D effort from the non-profit, Institute of Play, that's working with EA on this) with the first question of our mind: will Godzilla be there? No answers there, but GlassLab Producer Mat Frenz did clarify one thing: SimCityEDU will "function as a community for teachers who want to create and share lesson plans around the commercial SimCity game. Educators have been using SimCity to teach for decades. We are just providing a forum for these teachers with SimCityEDU."
The EDU site will presumably launch in conjunction with the official release of Sim City 5 on March 5. It will be seeded with lesson plans focused on middle-school curriculum, with lessons tagged with specific standards from the Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core.
