The coolest thing about cutting-edge learning resources like the Civic Mirror is that they attract cutting-edge teachers. Mr. Ken High, from Hudson High School in Hudson, Massachusetts, is one of those teachers. He discovered the Civic Mirror at the NCSS Conference in Atlanta in 2009, began using the program with his two colleagues (Ms. Ryan and Ms. Klotz) in their Civics courses shortly after, and has been an incredible contributor since.
As a member of the Civic Mirror Beta Testing team, some of Mr. High’s ideas (that hadn’t been brought up before) included:
- a “Register of Deeds” feature that would publicize and archive the sale prices of hex sales (i.e. real estate sales)
- the “Hand of God” admin feature where teachers could remotely operate their students’ accounts
- clarifications around wordings of ‘human services’ (esp. health units)
- hiding Hidden Agenda info on certain pages,
- a unit consumption idea where a pop-up window would appear when a citizen buys a unit, asking whether they want to save it for later use, re-sell it, or consume immediately
While we won’t be able to implement all of these ideas immediately, they have all been added to our development docket and will make the Civic Mirror a better program into the future.
We were sad to learn that Mr. High won’t be using the Civic Mirror in 2011/12 as he was given a 100% World History assignment, but his contributions have not gone unnoticed, he will be presenting the program at the NCSS 2011 Conference in Washington D.C., he will officially go down as the first teacher to use the simulation with the Massachusetts social studies curriculum.
