It’s been a busy latter part of the week and I haven’t had much time to finish a new article so I will just be sharing another interesting article, this time on urban planning. I spotted the article in my mailbox as part of a bulletin that I am subscribed to. Here’s a link to the article:
Teaching urban planning to pre-schoolers
It’s interesting to me as I am a teacher and I thought as I read this that we should probably be teaching transport planning or transport engineering to pre-schoolers as well. We are doing something like that for grade schoolers already in the form of road safety lessons. I am already curious about what topics to cover for pre-schoolers and how to teach them. Older children probably could go with SimCity and other computer games but pre-schoolers can be more of a challenge in terms of the tools you would need for them to learn. Using Lego is a brilliant idea and the same can be applied to transport as well in addition to maybe Matchbox and Tomica.
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Caught (up) in traffic 
Ah… I remember my childhood days where I would layout my idealized cities in my father’s computer. I initially had to make due with Microsoft Visio map templates because I didn’t know how to acquire SimCity yet. But when I did get to know how to, well, let’s just say that time was indeed spent. Lots of it.
As for simulation games, I’d like to suggest looking up ‘Cities: Skylines’ and ‘Cities in Motion’ by Collosal Order. The company’s games are actually well above par. Probably because, to quote their website, “(They) have a passion for old-school city-building games”.
And I’d like to further elaborate on Cities in Motion because unlike city-builders like SimCity and Cities: Skylines which are more on the urban planning side, Cities in Motion is actually focused on mass transit systems design and planning. You have different options from buses, trams, ground+underground+elevated rail, ferries, etc. Oh! And you can also watch people go through a city moving from route to route to get to their destination! Something for when you have free time? =D
I’m guilty with spending a lot of time on SimCity during my college days. The first early version was a bit crude compared to what they have these days. Cities in Motion is really good and I have a few students and former ones who are hooked with them game. These though can really be addictive and will definitely take much of your time that you won’t notice time passing by quickly.