Imagine a classroom where learning feels like a living, breathing civilization—complete with rival dynasties, branching tech trees, and game-changing strategies. That’s Civolution: EMC² Learning’s most ambitious deep-game resource yet.
Part Sid Meier’s Civilization, part Sim City, this is more than a lesson plan—it’s a second skin for your classroom. Students work in teams to found civilizations, earn Innovation points, unlock technologies, and climb their way through the ages. Along the way, they’ll showcase mastery of your content through meaningful, student-driven tasks.
Why Teachers Love It
Most of our resources are designed as plug-and-play engagement boosters—perfect for teachers just dipping into gamification. Civolution, on the other hand, is built for those ready to go all-in.
Teachers who’ve run it say they’ve “never seen their students this into a classroom activity before,” with reluctant learners suddenly strategizing, collaborating, and taking ownership like never before. Instead of group work that drifts into chaos, Civolution channels teamwork into purposeful decision-making where every move matters.
How It Works
At its core, Civolution is a flexible framework you can scale to fit your teaching needs:
Two days → A fast-paced classroom review game.
One full unit → A running simulation woven into your instruction.
An entire semester → A deep, evolving narrative where your students live and breathe the role of civilization-builders.
Every step is scaffolded for teachers. Want digital? No problem. Students can build interactive portfolios in Google Slides. Prefer analog? We got you! Print the tactile boards, cards, and tech trees for a screen-light experience. The resource download comes complete with a step-by-step walkthrough video for every stage of play, 30 different activity suggestions that can be popped and swapped into the gameplay with no other prep required, and a fully editable collection of printouts, score sheets, and presentation materials to help you really make the game work for your classroom.
No matter how you run it, the game unfolds in five easy steps:
Students choose their civilization.
Teams earn Innovation by completing your learning tasks.
Innovation is spent to unlock new technologies on the tech tree.
Teams track progress as their civilization grows.
The game culminates in a showcase—celebrating strategy, creativity, and content mastery.
Why It Works
Civolution transforms the way classrooms run by making learning a strategic challenge students want to tackle. It rewards curiosity, collaboration, and critical thinking at every turn. And because the framework is flexible, you can embed your existing lessons, labs, or writing prompts seamlessly into the simulation.
Think of it as an epic shell game: one that takes the content you already teach and wraps it inside a fully gamified, high-stakes experience. The result? Students who are talking, planning, and producing at the highest levels—because they’re invested in every decision their team makes.
The Big Picture
With Civolution, EMC² Learning is showing what’s possible when you take gamification to the next level. While many of our resources are perfect on-ramps for newcomers, this is the whole magilla—the type of immersive, strategy-driven simulation that lets engagement engineers sink their teeth into a full-scale classroom game.
If you’ve ever dreamed of blending structure, strategy, and student ownership into one resource, this is it. Civolution is big. It’s bold. And it just might change the way you—and your students—see learning.
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 1,000+ resources available and on their way to arrive shortly in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to all members with an active Engagement Engineer or Engagement Engineer PLUS account, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
