eLECTIONS and the Curriculum

eLECTIONS is designed to be used in a wide variety of ways. How you incorporate it into your classroom depends on the learning standards you want to meet, the content of your course, the interests, backgrounds and abilities of your students, the technology in your school, and the activities you use to engage students with the game.

eLECTIONS is most closely tied to civics, social studies and history. (View the list of standards correlated to eLECTIONS.) Because it also involves geography, math and English, it can play a key role in cross-curricular units as well.

eLECTIONS can be integrated with textbooks, contemporary news accounts, and historic investigations of previous elections. It can be the centerpiece of a unit or simply an extension activity. The LEARN MORE section draws on the rich resources of Cable in the Classroom's network partners: CNN Student News, History^TM, and C-SPAN to provide background information or the jumping off point to further research.

Below are some suggestions about how the game can be used.

• To introduce a new topic (such as democracy, civic education, elections or the presidency), you might have students play eLECTIONS and then discuss what they learned from the game. This is a good way to engage students and give those who do not follow elections some experiences and background knowledge to draw upon in future activities.



• Playing eLECTIONS can be the culminating activity of a unit. After completing lessons on civics or elections, students can play the game as a way of reflecting on or putting to use all that they have learned.



• eLECTIONS can be used to focus attention on one or more topics that will be covered in the lesson or unit, such as political parties, polling, campaign funding, voting rights, elections in the past, or this year's election. Students can play the game and use the rich video resources to delve deeper into a topic or as a jumping off point for students' independent research. (See Vote Notes for suggestions on how students can more fully explore many of these topics.)



• eLECTIONS can be played in as little as one class period. Since the game can be saved and resumed later, however, students could also play the game over multiple class periods. In that way, eLECTIONS can become a framework or a thread that ties together various aspects of a longer unit. At the start of the game, players can choose to resume a previously saved game or start a new game. The game saves your progress at various points along the way. If you exit the game you can later reload the game you created and named. It will resume the game to the last completed turn cycle. Saving stores a file on the player's computer. In order to resume that game, the player has to use that same computer.



• Playing several times also allows students to test hypotheses and observe how results can differ based on different strategies they use (such as the choice of states to campaign in or the expenditure of campaign funds).