ElectroCity


 * A brief description of the game**

[|ElectroCity] is an online computer game that allows users to manage a virtual town or city. The game teaches the user about energy consumption, environmental impact, and sustainability. In the game, you are given control of a small town. You are given 150 turns and at the end you are given four grades based on security of supply, your popularity, town population, and the environmental impact of your town. As a teacher, you can register your students and observe their progress. Before you get too excited about your personal progress, the game is developed for students between the ages of seven to nine years of age.



**Learning involved** In order to be successful in this game, the player must learn how to balance growth with energy needs. This seems more simple than it is because as the mayor of the town, you are also trying to keep people happy and increasing your population. In order to keep everyone happy, there are a lot of environmentally friendly energy options such as wind energy, solar energy, and thermal energy to name a few. It took me a while before I got to 150 turns. My town went bankrupt a few times and I had to learn how to grow slowly in order to survive to the end of the game. One thing that kept happening during the game was that my population kept going down. I thought this was odd. How can I have such great environmental impact, happy people, and still lose people? I had started at 10,000 and I went down in population until my town went bust.

I also notice that I was having to buy energy to keep my town alive. I had to keep building power plants even thought my population was not really increasing too much.




 * Teaching involved **

The game taught me by giving me continuous feedback. I could check on my progress after every turn and adjust my actions. The game also rewarded me by giving me money to spend if I did the right thing and by increasing my population, which also gave me even more money. It is very cyclical. If you are doing the right things every thing keeps getting better and the same goes for when things are going bad. An important teaching aspect of the game is all the tools the game offers teachers. From access their progress to lesson plans and additional learning materials for students.

Principles of Learning Unitized:
 * 1) Subset Principle: Learning takes place in a simplified form of the real domain.
 * 2) Identity Principle: Taking new identities such as being the mayor of a small town.
 * 3) Achievement Principle: Learner is rewarded with fake money and increases in population.
 * 4) Practice Principle: You are allowed to restart as many times as you want in oder to practice until you get to 150 turns.
 * 5) Ongoing Learning Principle: The more you play this game the more you learn how to be successful. After an hour I felt I had only used about a third of the options available to me.
 * 6) Intuitive Knowledge Principle: Knowledge is built by repeated practice.

**Online sites, forums, wikis, etc.**

The game offers a How to Play sections which offers the learner a great place to learn to be successful. Of course many will chose the try and fail method before they ever read these instructions.

http://www.electrocity.co.nz/HowToPlay/

**Overall reflection** I love these type of games. Games where you make choices and move through turns to be rewarded by growth and prosperity. In a way, it reminded me of Lemonade Tycoon. I love that game when I was young. I was most impressed with how many tools were available to teachers. I can certainly see this game being used in a fifth or sixth grade class. As a teacher, it would be important to prepare students for the difficulty involved in balancing growth and energy needs. Some students might give up if the are not prepared to play the game multiple times to succeed.

I cannot believe how amazing some of the finished cities look.