The Gauntlet

See what your students get, and why it lands.

No mockups. Every page below is real, pulled straight from the files you download. Tap any one to see it full size.

Your students are not answering questions. They are counting votes.

This is a faction profile, one of four blocs your students study before they trade a single provision. The Growth Caucus holds 112 seats. Community First holds 98. Neither pairing reaches the 218 needed to pass the House. Your students read each faction's red lines, see that no two-faction coalition can win, and start doing the math of compromise. They are not recalling the steps of how a bill becomes a law. They are deciding which of their own priorities to sacrifice to get the votes, and which faction to bring in third. The page hands them the real pressures of the floor, the seat counts, the poison pill, the chair who will turn hostile, and asks them to make a call that compounds for two more weeks.

Tap to read a student case file

A dead bill with a brilliant reflection is the highest score in the room.

Here is the rubric, and it never asks whether the bill passed. The Hybrid-100 scale puts 60 points on twelve daily journal entries scored against the seven kill points and five high-stakes decisions, 20 points on a holistic read of strategic reasoning and bias awareness, and 20 points on a final reflection with a 700-word floor. A student whose bill died on the Senate floor can earn full marks by tracing exactly why, what they anchored on, where they should have abandoned a provision sooner. The rubric is also AI-proof by design. To score well, a student must cite their own viability score history, the exact 1.8 billion dollar figure for the small business credit, and the seat counts they actually negotiated. Generic answers cannot fake a path that was lived.

Tap to read the grading rubric

Let the workbook hold the vote math so your students hold the strategy.

The viability score starts at 10 and moves with every choice. Court a committee chair, accept a hostile amendment, strip a provision, the number shifts, and the workbook tracks it in real time. Your students do not hand-tabulate faction support or recompute thresholds at each of the seven kill points. The spreadsheet carries that load. What it surfaces is the consequence: the score sitting just above or just below the survival line on Day 7, the Day 11 cloture bar at its highest. With the arithmetic handled, your students spend their energy where it matters, on whether to call a bluff, which coalition to build, what to give up next. The tool does the bookkeeping. The judgment stays with the student, recorded and visible day by day.

Tap to see the student workbook

Every day is already scripted. You bring the room, the simulation brings the rest.

The Kill Point Floor Script walks you through all 15 days session by session. It tells you when to trigger the Day 4 subcommittee vote, how to run the Day 10 filibuster threat from Senator Caldwell, and the exact words that move a defeated student into Analyst Mode with dignity: your bill is dead, but you are not done. You do not need to be a parliamentary expert. The guide names the pivot each day, the threshold the bill must clear, and the journal prompt that follows. Prep stays light because the facilitation is written out. You read the room, you push the questions, you keep the pressure honest, and the structure underneath, the factions, the scores, the kill points, is already built.

Tap to read the teacher guide

The lesson plan is already written.

Every simulation comes with a fully editable, admin-ready lesson plan. Standards alignment, daily pacing, learning objectives, differentiation, and an assessment plan are already done, so you can hand it to an administrator or adapt it to your district template in minutes.

Tap to preview the lesson plan

The day the favored bill meets the math that will not bend.

Maya ranked her provisions on Day 1 with confidence. Environmental Standards came first, the emissions benchmarks her values demanded, and she would not trade them. For three days the bill moved. Then the subcommittee vote arrived on Day 4 and the arithmetic turned cold. Her two-faction coalition reached 210 votes, eight short of 218, and the only path to the missing seats ran straight through the Heritage Coalition, who treated her Environmental Standards as a deal-breaker. The provision she most believed in was the exact reason her bill could not pass. She had built her whole strategy around protecting it, and the floor did not care what she believed.

She sat with it. Strip the provision and she might survive the House, but she would trigger a hostile chair in the Senate who shared her own values. Keep it and the bill dies here. Maya stopped defending her Day 1 ranking and started reading the landscape as it actually was. She stripped Provision E, logged exactly why in her journal, and watched her viability score climb back above the line. The bill she carried forward was not the one she wanted. It was the one the votes allowed. She could see, for the first time, the difference between what she valued and what she could pass.

One bill, four factions, seven places it can die.

Your students each carry the Community Investment and Opportunity Act, a five-provision bill, alone through the legislative gauntlet. They negotiate with four factions across 373 House seats and 21 Senate independents, where no two-faction coalition can win and every provision is a fracture point. From subcommittee to the president's desk, they trade priorities for votes, track a viability score, and decide at each kill point whether to compromise, fight, or let the bill go. The role is legislator, and then, often, political analyst.

Engineering better thinkers.

Legislation is where good reasoning meets brutal constraint. Most bills fail, so discernment matters more than enthusiasm. Each day pairs a legislative bias with the capacity that defeats it, activated at the exact moment the case puts that bias under pressure.

15 days through the legislative gauntlet.

Day 1 sets the diagnosis: students research biases and rank the five provisions by personal value. From there the bill runs the gauntlet, seven kill points across two chambers, each demanding a fresh coalition and a costly decision. The Day 4 choice compounds for the rest of the run.

Standards alignment.

The Gauntlet is built for the rigor of high-school civics. It maps to the C3 Framework inquiry arc and the NCSS Civic Ideals and Practices strand, and it carries the analytic demands of AP United States Government and Politics, the legislative process, committee system, coalition-building, and checks and balances between Congress and the executive. Students analyze the structure and function of the legislative branch, evaluate why most legislation does not advance, explain the role of compromise in a representative democracy, and assess how the Senate filibuster and conference committee shape outcomes. The writing load, twelve graded journal entries and a 700-word final reflection, meets disciplinary literacy expectations for evidence-based argument in social studies.

Turnkey, classroom-ready.