I have always enjoyed playing video games like many others in my generation. I felt like playing out classic battles from World War 2 in Battlefield 1942 or setting up a global world in the the game Civilization always brought more of my interest then studying about a famous conflict in a book or hearing about civic information in a classroom. Although I thought these games were beneficial my school didn’t and never incorporated them into our curriculum. I don’t really recall playing any computer based game other than the original Oregon Trail during my tenure as a student, but it’s good to see that the NETS push has brought interest into playing games to help students learn. I decided to try and pick the game I was most interested in and for me that was the People’s Pie.
People’s Pie is a really good game for understanding the basics of creating a country's budget. The game starts you off by going over each of the functions of the game. I think this is a critical aspect to a game because if the user isn’t entirely sure then there can be issues with effectively playing the game. After you understand the basics functions the game takes you to the start of your budget by having you build the foundation of the budget through raising taxes through corporate tax, payroll tax and income tax. After you begin building the foundation of your budget you’re burdened with picking the age of which you want your populous is set to retire. After picking the age you are then shown a bunch of cartoon faces that represent the different interests of the government with military, education and others represented. While making room for their budgets you have to have to not only accept their base needs but also find programs to approve and cut. You do this all while trying to keep your citizens happy with the changes that you make. Also whenever you run out of money you’re the right to borrow money but this affects interests rates and even though you may think it will make your citizens happy because the program is approved the higher interest rates then bring that happiness down. It’s an interesting prospect and I think it really shows to students the difficulties of the budget and the real challenges are government faces each day. In the common core curriculum it calls for,"Why does the government work sometimes and not others?" I think this game did a great job at exposing an answer for these question. It also allowed students to see how many different types of government can also work as well since the game had more than one solution. This simulation proved to me that video games have a place in the classroom and I look to make it part of mine.
After playing these games it really has created within me a nostalgic feeling for video games and their role in education. When I was in 2nd and 3rd grade Oregon Trail was the game most played by me and my fellow students, we loved naming the people in our wagon and sitting around the computer waiting for the journey to unfold. We learned more about the struggles of coming west than any book or movie could express to us. Ever since then I never really have had the opportunity to play videogames for educational benefit. Playing this game and reliving moments of my childhood have gravitated towards me trying to have these be played out in my classroom. As someone that is going to teach social science, I’m going to try to include the games that I enjoy and have many lessons of social science topics such as Civilization or Age of Empires. I believe incorporating these games into my teaching will help benefit students learn social science as games helped me learn the struggles of the Oregon Trail.
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