The materials below gather APSA’s Educate teaching resources and essays related to using simulations and games in the political science classroom. Do you have an active learning or experiential learning resource you would like to see featured below? Please send all inquiries to educate@apsanet.org
- How to do simulation games - A web-based resource for faculty looking to start using simulation games in their classroom, including a number of pre-prepared games, tools for creating your own activity, and walk-throughs of key pedagogical elements.
- Learning By Doing: The Power of Active Learning and Authentic Assessments in the Political Science Classroom - Recent essay reviewing the scholarship of teaching and learning on active learning in the political science classroom.
- Using Simulations to Promote Active Learning About Local, State, and National Government - Essay sharing ideas to connect your students to the political process.
- Short Reviews of Harvey, Fielder and Gibb (2022): “Simulations in the Political Science Classroom” and Nguyen (2020): “Games: Agency as Art” - Short essays from the editors of the Political Science Educator reviewing two recent books on simulations in political science.
- The Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE) - This page will take you to a Taylor and Francis search results page showing all of the JPSE’s peer-reviewed essays discussing simulations in the political science classroom.
- The Identity Exercise – a Tool to teach about different type of identities in the classroom- Essay and supplemental teaching tools explaining how to implement The Identity Exercise in your political science classroom.
- Wikipedia and Political Science: Addressing Systemic Biases in the Classroom - Together these essays discuss systematic knowledge gaps in political science and politics on Wikipedia and the efforts by political scientists to ameliorate these gaps through student initiatives in higher education.
- Teaching Civic Engagement Globally - This book published by APSA provides a wide range of pedagogical tools to help the current generation learn to effectively navigate debates and lead changes in local, national, and global politics.
- Amending the Constitution - This is an active learning assignment for a lower-division American Government course where the students serve as delegates in a “Convention of the States” to amend the US Constitution.
- Creating a Political Party and Platform Activity - In the assignment, students are asked to build a political party by thinking about the component parts of parties and then start to build the party platform by selecting key issues and suggesting solutions to deal with those issues. One of the goals of this assignment is to get the students to understand that partisanship and ideology are related to each other, yet also separate and distinct from each other.
- Community Mapping Project - To help students connect and visualize American politics to their own communities and potentially increase their civic engagement, students use their own local knowledge and experiences to map their neighborhoods or boroughs.
- Teaching American Politics: Civic Exercises - Curated APSA Educate page with over ten faculty designed American politics exercises.
- Space Traders – A Classroom Simulation - Essay sharing how to implement a simulation based on Derrick Bell’s fictional story from his Faces at the Bottom of the Well series.
- The Game of Politics: American Government Simulations - Large data set of original simulations spanning across American politics three branches of government. Options for small, large, and medium classes.
- Election Forecasting Assignment and Teaching Resources - this resource gives students the hands-on learning they need to understand the intuition behind forecasting and increases their comprehension of models of elections and voting behavior.
- Implementing Cahoot! in Undergraduate Political Science Courses- Kahoot! is an instructional tool utilized regularly by instructors throughout the K-12 system in the United States to gamify their classes. In this essay faculty share how they adapted these games to be suitable for the undergraduate level.
- Social Movement Case Study with Assignments: The ISAIAH Trash Referendum - This is a case study about an organization in Minnesota called ISAIAH, a faith-based organization that works to expand the power and influence of people who have often been overlooked, especially poor people and people of color.
- Social Movement Case Study with Assignments: The Montgomery Bus Boycott - The Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 is a classic example of a social movement episode that accomplished its immediate goals despite severe obstacles. It catapulted the 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into international prominence and launched similar episodes in many American cities across the South and then also the North. By investigating their situation and choices, you can develop skills and insights to use as activists today.
- Coloring Within (and Sometimes Outside) the Lines: Teaching Gerrymandering and Redistricting - Short essay discussing how to use active learning assignments to teach gerrymandering and redistricting.
- Political Communication: Course Syllabus, Grading Sheet, & Presidential Election Simulation - This class is aimed at combining theory and practice of political communication, examining the triangle between politics, the media, and the public. Students are expected to participate in a presidential election simulation by assuming the roles of presidential candidates, their staff, media personalities or the public.
- Saving our Fiscal Ship with Writing Assignment - Saving Our Fiscal Ship is an assignment based on student experiences with a robust budget simulation. The simulation calls on students to choose policy positions that reflect different partisan goals. In doing so, students apply knowledge learned in a lower-division American Government/U.S. Politics class.
- Learn by doing: A bill passage simulation for Intro to American Politics students - An essay sharing an example of a Congress simulation for the American politics classroom.
- Presidential Idol Group Presentation - Presidential Idol is a group project presentation that divides the class into groups of five-to-six students. Each group draws an American president (excluding the incumbent one) from a list of presidents created by the instructor. The group then researches the president and prepares a five-to-ten-minute presentation on why the group’s president should be the Presidential Idol.
- Student Assignment on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights – WWII Internment Camps - teaching resource asking students to engage with a documentary from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and either work in small groups or complete a writing assignment.
- Comparative Politics Coalition Building Simulation (Germany) - This exercises simulates the coalition building process after elections in a multiparty democracy (Germany). Students will bargain based on simplified positions in order to form a majority coalition government. It is designed to take 45-60 minutes (including a debriefing).
- Constitutional Engineers: Using Problem Based Learning in Comparative Politics - A brief essay explaining how to build problem based learning assignments into a comparative politics course.
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- International Relations Syllabus, United Nations Simulation and Rubric - These files include a syllabus for an upper-division survey course in international relations; a simulation template for United Nations Security Council using the hypothetical scenario of a zombie pandemic, and associated instructor rubrics for observation and grading.
- Syllabus, Assignment & Rubric for Intro to International Relations - Examples syllabus with a role play/simulation designed around the Iranian Nuclear Program where students must construct a policy position from the point of view of the ‘actor’ they represent and to negotiate this policy with the other ‘actors’.
- Model Diplomacy - Model Diplomacy offers free National Security Council (NSC) and UN Security Council (UNSC) simulations that present both historical and hypothetical scenarios based on real issues, with content informed by Council on Foreign Relations experts.
- AFTERSHOCK - A fast-paced, challenging game where players must cooperate to address a major humanitarian crisis.
- ICONS Project - The ICONS Project creates simulations and scenario-driven exercises to advance participants' understanding of complex problems and strengthen their ability to make decisions, navigate crises, think strategically, and negotiate collaboratively.
- Online Tragedy of the Commons Game/Simulation - This is a simple online multiplayer simulation of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons paradigm. There are also associated resources, including my own video lecture teaching the game. Faculty can sign up and use the game easily via the online form.
- Moving to Their World: Memes in a Political Philosophy Course - Essay sharing how to have students create memes in a political philosophy course.
- Liberty and Responsibility: Creating a Workshop Class in Applied Politics for Undergrad and Grad Students - An applied politics workshop that pairs abstract theory of politics with conventional politics provides a textbook example of hands-on instruction and lively student participation for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
- Student Podcast Assignment - Podcast assignment documents for an upper-level course in Feminist Political Thought (could be adapted to fit Political Ideologies and Intro to American Politics courses). The parameters — group size, podcast length, required elements, etc. — are all adaptable to different instructor and student needs.
- Civic Engagement as Critical Pedagogy - Short essay discussing how experiential learning goals were built into the following courses: Sustainability and the Cities; Civil Rights Policy and Politics; and Democratic Participation and Civic Advocacy.
- Information Evaluation, Political Deliberation and Critical Thinking at a Federal Courthouse - Short essay discussing how to connect your students to the Judiciary branch.
- We the People, We the Process: Engaging Students in Election Administration - Essay sharing how you can prepare your students to serve as local election administrators.
- Political Science Internships: Towards Best Practices - Political Science Internships: Towards Best Practices builds on a robust body of evidence that demonstrates the integrative power of internships to help undergraduate students learn by doing.
- Critical Thinking Modules - Eight critical thinking modules with supplemental teaching and learning research papers linked. Undergraduate students are able to take the modules as many times as they would like.
- Epistemology Module for Introduction to American Politics Courses - Essay discussing four information literacy modules.
- Group Activity: Write Your Own Headline - Students are placed into groups and provided with information concerning the methodology and results of a recent poll which has received media coverage. Groups are tasked with writing a headline they would use if it was up to them to report the results, and each group shares this headline with the class.
- Information Literacy Exercise - Comparative Democracy - This information literacy exercise is designed to elaborate on the concept of democratic consolidation and deconsolidation. It uses a set of Washington Post articles from 2016-2017 to start discussion about the state of democracy in Poland. It then requires students to seek out new information from a variety of sources to determine what they think has happened in the years since these were written, and to assess the current state of democracy on their own. Students then compare what they found based on the kind of source they were assigned.
- Critical Thinking, Information Literacy and Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Tackle Misinformation and Prepare Students for Active Citizenship - Essay discussing a multi-campus information literacy module.
- Improving Open-Source Information on African Politics, One Student at a Time - Teaching resource, associated podcast, and PS: Politics and Political Science article looking at an assignment asking students to create and edit Wikipedia pages on African Politics.
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- Teaching Undergraduates to Work with Archival Documents - Essay offering steps to prepare students to engage and use archival materials in the undergraduate classroom.
- Assignments for Using Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) to Teach Qualitative Research Methods - These resources help instructors plan lessons for teaching qualitative methods using Annotation for Transparent Inquiry
- The Importance of Data Soft Skills: Reinforcing Data Acquisition, Cleaning, and Communication in the Quantitative Analysis Classroom - Short essay discussing strategies and assignments to encourage students to learn quantitative data analysis.
- Quantitative Social Science Methods Course Module - Link to Gary King’s open sourced quantitative methods course module. Materials include reading, digital textbook, recorded lectures, and active learning tools.
- Peer Review Activity and Worksheet - This resource lays out a framework for a peer review workshop in online courses.
- US Foreign Policy in Sub Saharan Africa Project - Case study assignment helping students identify American foreign policy in Sub Saharan Africa over time.
- Using Virtual Gallery Walks to Build Community in Online Classes - Gallery walks are an active learning strategy that allow students to “walk” around a space and consider images, text, documents, or other students’ work to create a more interactive and less static learning environment.
- Using Light Board Lectures as a Tool for Student Engagement in an Online Political Science Statistics Course - Light boards are a multimedia tool to engage students in the online classroom.
- Creating Online Debates Using Kialo Edu - Kialo is a platform designed to provide structured online debates and encourage student community building.
- Playing Politics: Using Games to Help Students Prepare for Final Assessments - Brief essays discussing how to use games in both the virtual and in person classroom to help students prepare for final exams.
- Collaborative Civic Engagement Projects in Online Courses - Discussion of civic engagement assignments in a virtual comparative politics course.