Designing a city using a city building game (which I believe is still SimCity 4) while having it meet certain criteria Build a to-scale model of either a part, or the whole, of your city Take your model to a regional competition where you will show it off and explain to various panels of judges how your city is "futuristic." If you win you move into the national competition which takes place in Washington DC. If you win there, you get to meet the President or something (I don't know I never made it that far )

Hi there Mina Kvarter team! I saw the post on Reddit and thought I'd come and see how I can help!Let me start out by saying that this is my first post here on the paradox website, but I have lurked around for some time now, this just seems to be the first time I can provide input on something interesting. I don't know if I can be especially helpful to your team as I'm not a modder- I can't make 3D models, and God help us all if I try coding something. What I can do is offer some advice and insight into using a city-building game as an educational tool: something that can be both fun and promote learning.Here in the United States we have a nationwide competition for 6th-8th graders (12-14 years old) that promotes learning about engineering, city design, and how to be environmentally friendly, all while thinking about how today's technology will affect the future. The competition is aptly named the Future City Competition (FCC). The competition can be basically boiled down into 3 main parts:So I participated in FCC when I was in school and what I learned was that while it is fun to design cities and see your imagination become something tangible in front of your eyes, it wasimportant to make sure you were researching how cities are built, why they're built, who built them, and what technologies were used to build or improve upon them. As well as what technologies you can bring to your fictitious city. How would a city like New York change compared to a city like Berlin if all road vehicles were self-driving? Would it require upgrades to the road surface? Would it require the widening or shortening of roads? Would we be able to remove stop lights from intersections and light poles from highways? Would our city be able to invest more into education if we no longer had to pay police officers to patrol the streets looking for speeders? Would anything change at all? These were the kinds of questions that were more important to the competition than "should we build houses here, or a garbage dump?"I think Cities Skylines is a great tool to get a more visual representation of how a city would work than an actual city simulator. It has the look and feel of a real city, but the way it operates isn't quite realistic. Because of this, I think it's more important to you asthan as aWhich is what I think you want anyway, so, perfect! Due to its weaknesses as a simulator it is more important to understand city design. Your in-game CIMs will always be employed if there's a job available, even if it's a possible 4 hour drive. Your CIMs will also move into a house within meters of a nuclear power plant. Neither of these scenarios seem particularly realistic, so it's important to keep things like that in mind. Try not to build houses next to industry or you risk people getting sick and dying, never a good thing for a city! With that said, you don't have to build your dirty industries all the way out on the border, just far enough away that they don't make your citizens sick or keep them up at night. Notice that many large cities have warehouses and other small factories in different locations throughout the city.Since I don't really know if this is the kind of information you're looking for exactly, and I'm sure you've probably covered a lot of it yourselves, I'll try to wrap up my advice for you and your students:Study real cities. See how they're built. Think of why they're built the way they are. Don't just build a city to make it look cool; make it people-friendly, make it traffic-friendly, make it Earth-friendly. Focus more on thethan on theIf you can learn about the hows and whys of city building, it'll make playing Cities Skylines so much easier and more interesting.Good luck on your future projects, Mina Kvarter! I'll be around so if anything I said was somehow important to you, or you have any questions, just let me know and I'll be very happy to help!P.S. I thought you might want the link to the FCC website to see if there are any ways your two organizations might be able to help each other: http://futurecity.org/