Civic Mirror Overview

What is The Civic Mirror?

an online and face-to-face simulation-based program that turns classrooms into countries and students into citizens

The Civic Mirror’s real goals:

• To teach our students how the government, the economy, and our civic system all interconnect through experiencing it.

• To teach them about life and life-lessons, and

• To have lots of fun doing the above.

... and the whole simulated country scenario is managed for you with the online program.

Every Civic Mirror country is a 36-Hex Map!

There exists both an economy & a natural environment.

A class of students lives in

(i.e. shares) ONE country.

CIVIC MIRROR

IN

6 RULES

1. Your family of seven needs food and shelter to survive, and they want a bunch of other things.

2. Hexes provide what your family needs and wants, and you and your fellow citizens own them.

3. Hexes must be powered with an energy (E/I) unit before they can produce/provide anything.

4. You obtain E/I units by buying or trading them with the owner of the E/I hex

5. Once you have an E/I unit, you can power your hex and sell/trade it’s wares to your fellow citizens

6. There is no teacher or god to tell you how to do the above, so you must self-govern the whole scenario

And everything is prepped for you in student and teacher manuals.

There are two kinds ...

The Civic Mirror provides students with a

"looking glass" of sorts,

Challenging them to ask big questions as they

become citizens who must run their own country,

Questions like ...

The Civic Mirror has two stages of events:

CM Library (educators can share and collaborate on teaching ideas)

Live chat room

Online discussion forums

Wiki technology

CM Mail (everyone has their own inbox for private messages)

"Exposure to civics-related coursework is not enough to make more than a marginal difference for the vast majority of students.

Far more important to predicting knowledge and discussion is whether students acquire a liking for the subject matter."

CIRCLE research finding

"Civic gaming experiences are strongly related to civic engagement."

"Educators have a real opportunity to reach students through games.

Building on the one-third of teens who reported playing games as part of a class assignment, teachers might incorporate games with explicit civic content into their curriculum."

Joseph Kahne, Civic Engagement Research Group

The End

STAGE 2: Game Events

That Make Up "Simulated Years"

STAGE 1: Pre-Game

"Nation-Building" Events

The Civic Mirror is an event-based game. The events occur in the classroom, but the program is run by an online program ...

The classroom events are all script-based, allowing the students to run them on their own.

U.S. Module

Canadian Module

Government Event

The game goals, however, are to earn STATUS POINTS

Open Market

And this is what it looks like online!

Event Script Snapsot

Hidden Agendas

Money Allotments

Summer

Town Hall

National Court

What Kind of Citizen Will

I Become?

What type of country do I want to create?

used to simulate revolutions

Implementing the Civic Mirror

Learning with the Civic Mirror

Civics 10 with The Civic Mirror

Experiential Center-Piece of Course Delivery

Stand-Alone Unit

Experiential Learning

Students' PERFORMANCE is Evaluated

in the following ways:

• success in the game
• attitude & participation
• initiating/implementing a new idea
• demonstration of learning

Reflection & Connection

the simulated experience allows students to think about how they're country relates to issues in the real world

providing teachers with endless teachable moments

CIVICMIRROR.COM also comes with Web 2.0 Tools that allow teachers and students to continue their learning and discussions and debate beyond the classroom walls.