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« on: January 31, 2012, 03:10:38 pm »
I'm a big believer in the idea that you learn more from applicable knowledge.
For example, I learned Japanese in school for eight years, yet I know more German from playing WWII based computer games.
However, DF would never be allowed in a public setting, like school. Can you imagine bringing up a computer in the middle of geology class to tell your sixth grade students what coal can be used for, but instead having to watch kittens explode into a million pieces because your people were bored of eating purple mushrooms?
That's just one example. Practically everything in Dwarf Fortress is ethically and morally wrong in some way. In order to make it 'suitable' for classroom use, you'd have to change so many absolutely necessary pieces of the game, and that's completely counter-productive to the idea in the first place.
If you managed to get vanilla DF into the classroom, I think it would work quite well. It could be used in Engineering, Architecture, Geology, Hydrodynamics, Medicine, History, Warfare, Biology, Chemistry, and dozens of other fields, all of which would be immediately applicable knowledge.
If my teachers used DF as a learning tool, I would pledge undying allegiance to their most godly of teaching methods.
