The world is complicated.
The activity should know that.

Politics happens through arrangements.

Who gets to decide? Who can block a decision? Who belongs, and who is told to wait? A constitutional rule, an administrative record or a boundary can change the answer. These activities make those arrangements something students can investigate.

Possible States puts choices, evidence and explanations together. Students form governments, examine public claims, negotiate authority and confront rules that seemed simpler at the start. The point is to develop a defensible explanation, including what it cannot establish.

A laboratory for reasoning.

Simulations simplify. That is useful when the simplification makes a mechanism visible, and a problem when it becomes a claim about the whole world. Each teaching guide identifies the model’s limits. Fictional records, programmed outcomes and historical evidence have different jobs; students should be able to tell them apart.

Activities preserve first answers and revisions where relevant. Finishing is not the same as demonstrating understanding. An instructor, discussion partner or curious reader still has to examine the reasoning.

Access, saving and teaching.

The collection is free to use. Students start without an account and leave with a file they can submit through their own course system. Teaching guides are directly available. The collection focuses on simulations; additional resources may be added when they serve the same teaching purpose.

The creator, briefly.

Yoav Duman is a political scientist and educator whose teaching spans comparative politics, international relations, American government and citizenship. He builds activities around a classroom problem: students can know the vocabulary and still struggle to explain how a political arrangement produces a consequence.

The simulations ask students to make a choice, work through the evidence and explain what follows. This collection makes that teaching work available to other instructors, with the preparation, assessment guidance and limits close at hand.

More about Yoav’s teaching and research ↗

Why “Possible States”?

States are countries. They are also conditions and arrangements. The name leaves room for comparing how power works, and asking what another arrangement might make possible.

Created by Yoav Duman. Suggestions and classroom observations are welcome through the creator’s contact page. Please do not email student work or identifying information without an appropriate reason and permission.