I’m a Social Studies teacher in the US and am interested in using D3 in the classroom. It’s great to see support for education licenses, which should help convince the Education Coordinator that it would be worth investing in the game.
A couple of questions:
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Is there any way of being able to connect up with other educators that have already used D3 in the classroom? I’d be interested in hearing their approach and what kind of feedback they can give on their student’s educational output. In searching online I’ve only come across a couple of reviews of the game on an educational website, amounting to “we used it and it was great!” More details please!
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I work with at-risk youth and there are often cognitive challenges that have to be accommodated with my students. While D3 looks great I can see that for some students the amount of information they have to process would likely be overwhelming and not lead to productive lessons. I’m wondering if the ability to mod the game includes being able to streamline the simulation? Is it possible to strip away various situations and policies so that a less dense set of options would be presented to students? A variant might be to place policy options that start on the board but move them into the policy ideas menu, that way they still can be implemented, but “cleans up” the main view of the game?
I can see how stripping out elements could wreak the simulation, however for classroom purposes it might not be a problem as the main idea of the lesson would be demonstrating the interelatedness and complexity of society and politics. the amount of time spent using the game might preclude completing a whole simulation, and so as long as the main ideas can be demonstrated and the students can explore the concepts then it might work long enough before the simulation comes crashing down.