Within the U.S. electoral college, there’s a total of 538 electors, distributed to the states based upon the results of the census. A candidate only needs to receive 270 to achieve a majority. 270 to win. It’s a fundamental truth of the modern U.S. presidential election. It’s a number that, since becoming the required total during the 1964 presidential race, has become part of the yearly iconography.
Educational games like “Win the White House” and “Race to 270,” created by iCivics and Junior Scholastic respectively, serve to present this by allowing students to run their own presidential campaigns, selecting issues and choosing which states to visit to sway in their favour.
With these programs, students are playing against a computer. No outside events occur that sway the nation one way or another, there’s no primaries nor debates between candidates. They select states to visit, run ads, and present what their issues are, but that’s where the scope ends.
Youth In Government, operated by the Youth Leadership Association (YLA), is designed to give students a more hands-on approach to civics education, where rather than student versus computer, it’s student versus student. Over the course of three days, students operate a faux-state government, including all three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial). This includes everything from drafting and passing legislation to hearing cases before the court.
With recent calls for increased civics education by both the state government and those running to be part of it, both these digital and real life simulations provide interesting opportunities.
In a 2010 Democracy & Education article, Walter C. Parker of the University of Washington, in collaboration with Jane C. Lo, then with the University of Florida, advised the possibility of reorganizing existing civics classes to be based upon multiple simulation projects rather than a traditionally formatted class.
By splitting the curriculum of a traditional AP Government and Politics (AP-GOPO) class into three to six week long simulations, Parker and Lo contend that it enhances both student engagement by the very nature of the simulation. Further, they argue that it reduces cramming habits (‘pancaking’) caused by traditional textbook interaction with the curriculum.
Two other advocates for this type of project-based learning (PBL), Katie Piper and Jerry Neufield-Kaiser, observed that by switching certain aspects of the classwork, such as learning the required court cases, from “death by powerpoint” to oral arguments and debate simulations.
Though it may overall eat away at the time to cover every single case, by creating a deeper understanding of a few cases, with the outlines of others, students performed better on the civil liberties and civil rights sections of the test.
Additionally, they noted that it aided other skills vital to life beyond high school: Written and spoken communication. By having students engage in healthy debate, it forces them to interact more deeply with the covered material, to think critically about what exactly they’re saying.
It’s worth noting that in Walker and Lo’s article, they do stop to praise iCivics and similar digital simulation programs, but continue to strongly advocate the PBL-simulation style engagement with civics education. Perhaps they state the case for it best at the end of their article:
“…without innovation, this course [AP-GOPO] becomes merely a step on the college-entrance credentials ladder rather than a profound, adaptive civic learning experience.”
