Knowledge of foreign political systems allows students to compare the ways in which governments face similar problems, and the manner in which they respond to the needs and demands of their citizens. From the examination of these countries, students should be better able to understand their own systems, and become more aware of the interrelationship between considerations of domestic politics and global dynamics. Up to 10 small groups of students are formed into bands of colonists and planted on earth in the year 4000BC, surrounded by the hazards and delights of unexplored territory. The success of each simulated community depends on the decisions of the students, and every decision they make can have important ramifications later. As time passes, students are faced with increasingly difficult decisions, and each city that is founded has its own problems and opportunities.
Educational software is most effective in a group environment.
There are several reasons for this. The ideal size of a team is 3-4 students, which is a large enough number to generate discussion without being so large that individual students can opt out without being noticed. From a teacher's viewpoint, one of the most rewarding outcomes of using educational software is the speed with which student discussions become sophisticated, informed, cooperative, and tolerant, and how much more attainable the global perspective becomes with each new simulation in the series. Perhaps the single characteristic which makes modern global education difficult to teach using conventional methods is the concept of interdependence. Since everything depends on everything else, discussions of particular choices and their impact are often confusing and contradictory, and the logical connections which might seem so obvious to the teacher are only dimly perceived by the student.