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Using Cyber Nations in the Social Studies Classroom


Hermanote

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I am a high school social studies teacher.  I have looked for years for an online simulation to use in conjunction with certain Geographic themes like political geography.  Cyber Nations seems like it may be useful for this and I will be playing for a while to see if it is possible.

 

I have a couple general questions first:

 

  1. Has this ever been attempted and, if so, what were the results and any suggestions for this?
  2. Can I set up a closed game so only my students can play?  This might be the only way we can do this due to restrictions our school places on internet activity.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Hermanote

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1) Probably, yet the results weren't really disclosed if it did happen.

2) Impossible, Admin only has two games set up: Standard and Tournament Edition. One-off servers just can't be done. Your students would need to play the game from home and you would need to apply for a protector in order to be able to prevent you or your students getting rolled by a malicious party.

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  1. It has been done before, can't remember any direct results being posted here.
  2. Not possible, and closed games take away the magic that CN is.

Just form one alliance or maybe more, the Cyber Nations wiki contains huge amounts of information on how alliance are structured or what is important for some to have in their charters. You then can assign government roles to students and just throw the into the deep.

 

More than likely they will have to work together and create diplomatic relations to survive.

Edited by xoindotnler
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The issue that I see here is that students will most likely play this during school hours, unless you decide to play in off-school hours. If they play during school hours, all of the nations will end up having the same IP.

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A private server is out of the question.

CN has been used as a teaching aid in the past, however we do not know the results.

What we do know is that a few from these classes violated the rules by creating multiple nations or otherwise violating the rules, resulting in bans.

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I joined CN in 06, my teacher used CN as an extra credit project back in into to comparative politics in high school. We never released the results to CN as far as I know. 

 

Basically the project was create a nation, join an alliance, compare alliance and geo-political situation to something we had covered in class. I did the GW era (present day CN during my project) to power politics theory. Was especially easy since people used to post ridiculously thorough posts about CN ideology. 

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I am a high school social studies teacher.  I have looked for years for an online simulation to use in conjunction with certain Geographic themes like political geography.  Cyber Nations seems like it may be useful for this and I will be playing for a while to see if it is possible.

 

I have a couple general questions first:

 

  1. Has this ever been attempted and, if so, what were the results and any suggestions for this?
  2. Can I set up a closed game so only my students can play?  This might be the only way we can do this due to restrictions our school places on internet activity.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Hermanote

 

CN has essentially nothing to do with reality.  If I was a parent who found out that you were spending class time on Cybernations, I'd do my best to get your fired.

 

Teach kids about the real world, not an artificial game that most people have never heard of.

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CN has essentially nothing to do with reality.  If I was a parent who found out that you were spending class time on Cybernations, I'd do my best to get your fired.
 
Teach kids about the real world, not an artificial game that most people have never heard of.

The meta game is fairly interesting from a political standpoint. Not just inter-alliance politics, but intra-alliance as well. How people organize themselves to cooperate and compete for shared or rival goals is very much a social studies question and Cybernations is a valid example of those interactions because as much as they're "not real life" they aren't actually simulated either.
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You could say that there are some real life lessons to be learned, but there are also many "wrong" lessons (CN doesn't function like the real world.)

 

The biggest problem with trying to use CN in a classroom setting is that CN is a 7 year old game and a very slowly paced one at that.  It takes a long time for anything to happen.  The political cycle of war, rebuilding, and build up to the next war is 8-12 months.  It takes years to build a nation of any significance.  People generally only collect every 20 days, and buy things even less frequently.  It also takes a long time to learn the culture enough to operate successfully within it.

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in college i took a course which siumlated nations with a book. CN is much easier and probably less time consuming.

 

 

the book:

 

http://www.amazon.com/International-Relations-Action-Politics-Simulation/dp/1588264645/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384119125&sr=8-1&keywords=international+relations+in+action

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CN has essentially nothing to do with reality.  If I was a parent who found out that you were spending class time on Cybernations, I'd do my best to get your fired.
 
Teach kids about the real world, not an artificial game that most people have never heard of.

CN doesn't have much to do with real life politics, but it does teach human interactions, and the tendency of groups of players to spontaneously create their own mores and political no-nos. So from a sociological standpoint I would disagree.
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