Here are the top
five educational reasons SPORE
should make its way into the classroom. IMHO.
1. World Building
Maybe it is because I am an old-school roleplayer, but the
value of learning how to build worlds and foster your imagination through
creating stories within those worlds is an important skill to develop if we are
interested in developing children who can share ideas and knowledge through
stories. Storytelling has been the primary method for sharing
2. Understanding Relationships
The process of moving through the stages from the evolutionary
sludge up to venturing into space and beyond helps children develop an
understanding about how decisions impact on relationships. The process is
simplistic, yes, but very suitable for a child under 12s level of development.
Aggressive actions in the creature stage lead to tribes and civilizations more
likely to develop and evolve through war and conflict. Friendly, cooperative
actions in the creature stage lead to more peaceful methods of development like
economic. The graphs and details at the end of each stage are simple and
effective in demonstrating this.
3. Media Literacy
I have been very
interested in developing my boys knowledge of not just how computers work, but
how media is made. I have used Pivot Stick
Figure Animator to help them understand how cartoons are made by allowing
them to make their own simple cartoons. We talk about advertising on television.
And, with SPORE’s Galatic
Adventures extension they can now develop a simple understanding of how
computer games are made. When we play together I prompt them by saying: “See,
everyone who makes computer games makes decisions about what creatures go where,
how they move and whether they attack you or not.” This develops in them a
greater capacity to understand the new media world they are growing up in.
4. Learning about Evolution
SPORE is all about the evolutionary process. Ok, not deeply
scientifically rigorous, but for younger children it is a good way to introduce
the basic concepts of evolution and how we developed to become the frontal lobe
bearing species we are today. It sparks interesting discussions about what might
be happening in other planets and how even if we discover life in space that it
might not be as evolved as we are, or even more evolved.
5. Cultural Studies
As they build your own tribe in the original game, or build
entire tribes and cities in the Galactic Adventures extension pack, children
gain an understanding and learn about the differences between cultures. They
know not to approach certain tribes because they are hostile. They recognize
that some cultures live off fish, or others hunt for food. They see how this can
develop into different religions and the differences in cultures becomes very
obvious in the Space stage where the many different encounters are quite rich
and nuanced in terms of how they talk, engage and what they believe in.
I’m not a teacher,
but if I was I’d be incorporating the development of a world in SPORE into my
classroom activities and engaging children in learning through computer games
across the SPORE
Galaxy.