Oh Yes, It’s True.
With our recently released Country Rankings feature, classes can compare and contrast how well their Civic Mirror countries are doing to other ones around the world.
For example, with roughly a month left in the 2014/15 school year, Grexico – a 10th Grade Civics class from Timiskaming District Secondary, Ontario – is the current overall leader with a National Score of 6.3/10. As you can see below, their strong indicators are social equality (8.6) and environmental quality (8.5), while their health care (3.3) needs major improvement.
If we reverse-sort the overall standings, we see that a country named Ballhamas is currently at the bottom of the heap at 2.7/10, with Kahnada a close second. These countries have some serious problems.
Moving From “Me to We”!
What’s so exciting about this is that for the first time in Civic Mirror history, there are in-game metrics that highlight how good or bad these student-created countries are to live in. It better enables students to reflect on questions like, “Would I really want to live in our country?”, or “What do we need to do in order to make our country better?”
Every participants’ actions have effects on the nation’s overall score. This is huge! For example, if Joffrey lived in a country within minimal food and chose to consume 3 food units because he wants to score the added Well-Being Points (he only needs 1 to keep his family alive), two of his classmate’s simulated family members would die due to starvation. Up until now in Civic Mirror, Jofffrey’s only concern would be whether or not someone would sue or criminally prosecute him. But NOW, with Country Rankings and Tournaments (more on tournaments below), his actions will directly worsen his country’s National Score, specifically in this case, the mortality rate.
What’s so educationally powerful here is that National Score’s for force Civic Mirror students to get past the ME and start thinking about the WE. But wait, it gets better.
Civic Mirror Tournaments
Nothing spices things up like a little competition. And so, this past week we uploaded a “How To Create CM Tournaments” document to the Educator Space and the General Discussion forum within civicmirror.com (direct links can be found on the Getting Started page). What’s so great about this is that now – for the first time – educators can coordinate competitions with other classes.
For example, a school running multiple sections of CM could create an in-school competition with a fun prize at the end of the winners (page in year book, recognition at an assembly, etc). Various schools within a city or district could create a local-area tournament and arrange some type of award or celebration at the end of the year (winner receives a pizza party, or teachers submit article to local newspaper about winners, etc). And teacher-friends working at different schools can now create competitions between their various classes.
The possibilities with CM Tournaments are endless and exciting… all while adding fantastic learning opportunities to everyone’s simulated experience. And who said Social Studies is boring!?
