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Comment by Byron Lane on December 29, 2011 at 10:11pm

Unbelievable!  This is teaching at its finest.  I marvel at the complexity of this game, especially because I had done something...I can NOT use the word "similar"...on a much more base level when I was a classroom teacher. 

Ten or twelve years ago, when I taught third grade, I created a "world" on a 4' x 8' corkboard that hung outside our room.  It included gridlines, large and small landmasses, land and sea-based vehicles--it was a very primitive game modeled after Sid Meier's computer game "Civilization."  It was turn-based and included rudimentary "tasks," mostly focused on capturing pirate ships--once you did, you were asked a Social Studies question from a review sheet: answering correctly earned you "game gold" which let your country buy more things--and increasing your nation's population, which happened based on the number of farmers and the size of the farmland the team had.  Something to do with multiplying the area of the farm times the number of farmers.  

I can't remember most of the rest of the game, but I do recall thinking that I was going to try to improve our game with some of the ideas I had seen on a new CD game that had just come out called My City (the gamer is mayor of a town and has to make decisions about issues that came up).  I never got to do this because I was asked to become the math specialist that next year, but I always wondered if it could have worked.  Seeing "The World Peace Game" shows me that it could have, and makes me wish that I had started my game years earlier.  What a fantastic teaching tool "World Peace Game" is.

Mr. Hunter is a visionary thinker.  This game should be in every school in the country.  The entire English and Social Studies Standards can be written to speak to the issues this game forces upon the players.  Curricular integration, differentiation, tiered activities...all in spades.  Seeing this game makes me want to go back to the classroom.  I'm so impressed.