Was it worth it? I am always interested in student feedback on my experiments. So, here a graph of the student feedback I got back on the SimCity Urban Design Challenge (see my previous post):
Click to enlarge
And here is their written feedback:
- I liked the project a lot and it helped me understand how city planning and managing a city works. It helped a lot since I’m a visual learner also.
- Christian Lucas Says, it actually really helped me understand how a city works. And I especially liked how it was interactive, you basically found out the hard way how a city worked and it was fun.
- I found this to be the most stressful assignment all year. I did learn from playing and it showed me how complicated managing a city is but I would never want to play this game again. For the future, I would somehow change this assignment either by making it shorter or by briefing people better on how to play.
- Even though the correlation to the unit is there, it didn’t really help much with comprehension and was really sort of frustrating.
- I thought the game was valuable because it reinforced many concepts and made me actually deal with a lot of issues that city planners have to do. But it was really challenging and frustrating as well and although I think it was beneficial to understand what city planners go through it was also stressful. Overall I liked the idea though and I think future classes should do it.
- It was helpful to a certain point. There were some things missing from the game that we went over, but many things in SimCity were helpful.
- Sim City was a good tool to use when we were learning about urban planning. While I understood the terms and programs that urban planners used before we played Sim City, the game just really reinforced how difficult it really is to maintain and expand a city.
- SimCity helped me learn zoning, and city budgets.
- I was never really that confused about what we learned in class, but the game helped explain it further.
- I thought it was a fun way of learning a lot like being involved.
If you want to know more about lessons learned from the game, you can read an account at our class blog.
Will I do this again? Probably. I just heard that Electronic Arts,the maker of SimCity, is releasing a new version designed for use in education! Check it out.
What would you do? Did any comments resonate with you?
I love all the sim games. Sim Ant was a great one for understanding how ant colonies work and Civilization was a great game to understand how societies evolve and what they need to be successful.
I always find the students reflections on these activities fascinating. The lion’s share of your kids seem to have learned something from the game. FWIW, I think the reflective feedback survey you had the kids do is probably a critical part of the process. It forces them to slow down, think about what they did, ask themselves what did they learn and how can they get better, and … all the best stuff that comes with reflective formative assessment.
I look forward to seeing what this looks like with the new version of Sim City next year. It’ll be interesting to compare the feedback you get then across the two years.
Thanks, Darren. You just gotta love the honesty of number 3? Some kids just want things laid out step by step. The whole goal is to push them to “break” the system (city) and find out what it takes to “fix” it. Frustrating for some.