Take-Two Interactive Software, 2K and Firaxis Games are partnering with nonprofit GlassLab Games to take a version of the popular turn-based strategy game Sid Meier’s Civilization V into high schools in North America. Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization franchise, announced the news at this year’s Games for Change festival in New York.

CivilizationEDU will debut in schools in the fall of 2017. The history-inspired, turn-based strategy game has sold more than 8 million copies and is highly educational even in its unmodified state. The award-winning series is now 25 years old, but its basic gameplay hasn’t strayed from enabling players to build and run their own empires from the Stone Age to the modern age.

CivilizationEDU will provide students with the opportunity to think critically and create historical events, consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions, and to engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development.

Nonprofit GlassLab Games was founded with the mission of combining video games with learning experiences. Much like Minecraft‘s educational edition and SimCityEDU also made by GlassLab, CivilizationEU will add learning analytics to capture a students’ progress and assess their skills. Teachers who use CivilizationEDU will have access to an online dashboard that will provide reports on students’ progress and lesson plans aligned to academic and 21st century standards.

“For the past 25 years, we’ve found that one of the fun secrets of Civilization is learning while you play,” added Sid Meier, founder and director of creative development at Firaxis Games, in a statement. “We’ve always focused on entertainment first, but we believe that our players – young and old – enjoy learning, even if they don’t always enjoy education. Civilization players find fun in discovering new civilizations, running into famous historical leaders, and charting their own version of human history. Along the way, players learn valuable lessons from their success and failures and are able to try again, employing different choices and strategies. We’re absolutely thrilled to be partnering with GlassLab and I am excited to see CivilizationEDU in classrooms next year.”

For those who have are no longer required to spend their days in a classroom, there’s another Civilization game on its way: Civilization VI is out this October, in time for the series’ 25th anniversary.

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