Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative instruction. Beyond the content of the game, students need ideas to be reinforced, or at least prefaced with contextualizing information. The McGill simulation’s site contains a terrific library of lesson plans, activity sheets, and information pages that should be a model for other educational sims. Here is a description of the project:
“A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in the 1890s†is a 3D world which recreates a Quebec village of the 1890s, complete with characters of that time with whom elementary school students can interact. You can use this 3D world to teach students about life in Canada (and specifically in Quebec) at the end of the nineteenth century, and encourage students to compare life in that place and time with their contemporary lives in order to understand better the changes that have taken place.
Kevin Kee, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing of Brock University helped develop this simulation while working at McGill, and is currently working on a historical simulation in Second Life. I’ll definitely be posting about this in the future