ABSTRACT
This game will take you to the 1787 Constitutional Convention where you will serve as a delegation from a given state. Your goal is to re-sculpt Madison’s initial proposal for the Constitution in your favor. To do so, you are given objectives and provided with rules of debate and amendment. Massachusetts, for instance, desires representation to be apportioned on the basis of population, while Georgia seeks the opposite. However, as with the Constitution, the document can only be ratified by three-fourths of the delegations, making it very difficult to assemble a final document without forcing students to make compromises in their initial strategies. It may be quite difficult for three-fourths of the states to agree on one version of the Constitution, and so students will be pressed to negotiate carefully across several well-defined policy areas, just like the actual delegates in 1787. The game’s winner is the delegation that achieves the most points through seeing their objectives represented in a final ratified document.
