Civilization's heading back to school---and no, it's not just as an alternative assignment from your cool history teacher.
Sid Meier took to the stage at the Games4Change festival today in New York to announce that Firaxis Games is teaming up with GlassLab Games to create a version of Civilization V called CivilizationEDU, an educational version of Civilization optimized for classrooms.
A press release published on the ESA website states that CivilizationEDU will "provide students with the opportunity to think critically and create historical events, consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions, and engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development."
Additionally, GlassLab will be integrating a learning analytics engine to CivilizationEDU to gather data on student behavior and provide teachers with a dashboard of their progress and understanding of the game's curriculum.
Specific gameplay details aren't available at this time, but Firaxis has confirmed the game will be available in fall of 2017.
Civilization's addition to the ranks of educational games expands the list of large, commercially popular titles such as Minecraft and Portal, which have adapted themselves for the classroom, and is a particularly strong addition to the list given its direct connection to classroom material and the extensive research Firaxis does when making Civilization games.