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Like millions of other gamers around the planet, I am totally excited for the release of Will Wright‘s new life-building game Spore. Up until this morning, I just thought of it as being a cool new sim to mess around with, but after reading a tweet from Riptide_Furse, I checked out Wright’s TED Talk and now I see that this game will have huge educational potential for a wide range of learners.

Players will be able to create evolutionary models, play with food webs and even investigate the effects of global warming within a few hours of game play. As Wright mentions in his talk, sim games allow us (and young learners) to develop better long-term thinking. It is difficult for us to realistically think and plan for events one hundred or two hundred years into the future. Sims shrink this time frame down, showing direct cause and effect relations that a simple textbook or series of images cannot. Spore’s colourful, Pixar-style animations wrap projection models into fun scenarios that are not only educational but enjoyable to create and watch. It’s this role of learner as creator that makes the impact of the results all that more effective.

Wright’s talk is also enjoyable to watch, so take about 15 minutes and check it out: