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Cities: Skylines now offers an educational version for classrooms

Cities: Skylines now offers an educational version for classrooms

Finnish edugaming experts TeacherGaming have worked together with Paradox Interactive to create Cities: Skylines: Education Edition.

The educational version of Cities: Skylines includes eight bespoke scenarios, each including a thorough lesson plan and student progression tracking. Each custom-built level intends to teach one of a variety of civic topics, from sustainable city planning to active citizenship and the Human Development Index.

An example lesson plan on the Education Edition website outlines a pollution scenario. Through tutorials, the plan informs students on the various forms of pollution and how to deal with them. The mechanics of the game appear to translate easily into real-world concepts.

“Transitioning our games into teaching tools that make learning fun and interactive is something near and dear to our hearts at Paradox,” said Shams Jorjani, VP of business development at Paradox Interactive. “We chose TeacherGaming to help structure our games for the classroom, because this is a new field for us and they have the right experience and knowledge to do it right.”

TeacherGaming is responsible for similar projects that brought video games to the classroom. The startup helped develop KerbalEdu  and MinecraftEdu - the latter was later picked up by Microsoft.

TeacherGaming CEO Santeri Koivisto added: “Paradox Interactive titles turn niche topics like civics and serious history into unexpectedly entertaining experiences that educators will fall head over heels for.” He added, “Committing to such an unconventional portfolio means Paradox is combating prejudices about the very nature of video games, and that’s also what we have been out to do for the past six years. In that sense, and many others, this partnership is a perfect fit.”

Cities: Skylines - Education Edition is available now, offering packages starting from $150 per school. Moving games into schools has become popular, with PC Building Simulator currently eyeing up a classroom edition.


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Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.