People's Pie/iCivics

People’s Pie is a video game where you, the player, has the power to decide how you want to allocate money on federally funded programs in the United States.  The game allows you to fund, cut or borrow money to balance the federal budget. Programs include Social Security, Medicare, Military Defense, Transportation, Housing, Education, State & Foreign affairs, Financial & Banking services, Labor, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security, Conservation, & Energy, and Agriculture. One learns while playing the game, that crucial decisions have to be made when deciding on what government programs get cut or funded.  Also, the decisions made on cutting or funding a federal program may produce results that may lead to favorable or unfavorable consequences.
 
The rules for playing and winning the game are pretty simple: balance the federal budget, don’t go into debt, and keep the citizens happy. Sounds easy, right?  Not necessarily. For example, if you try to keep the taxes the citizens pay low, then your budget is out of balance due to the heavily funded entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.  One can try taking money from the Defense budget by cutting the military, such as the Air Force.  The budget may be balanced, but the citizens are giving you a low approval rating because they don’t want to be without defense. If you start borrowing heavily to pay for some of the programs you decide to fund, the interest rate can go to an astronomical rate of 54% interest!  A lesson learned from the game is that the budget may be balanced, but the citizens are not happy or the citizens are pleased and given you a high approval rating, but the budget has led the nation to financial collapse.

A benefit of using People’s Pie, when teaching an economics course in a high school classroom, is that it meets the History-Social Science Content Standard for California Public Schools, standard 12.3 for Economics: Student’s Analyze their influence of the federal government on the American economy. Students will learn from playing this game an understanding of the actions of the federal government has benefits and consequences that could lead to higher taxes, entitlements in jeopardy, unemployment, and the increase of taxes on goods and services. 

A good way to teach the course to students in 12^th grade economics is having them play the game first before the lesson is given on government spending.  Students can take notes on the choices they made, borrow money, and have very irate citizens upset with their decisions.  The teacher then conducts a lecture explaining the importance of each of the federally funded programs. The students can then go back and play the game a second time to see if they scored better and then deeply analyze about the decisions they made and why they made them.
 
In the end, the goal is to have the students retain the lessons from the California content standard and have an understanding of working with real world problems and issues facing the U.S. government.  Also, the students will have fun working with a project based learning experience that will help them retain information on government programs essential to society. Lastly, the students will learn and discover that federally funded government programs are not as easy to budget as they thought and can be controversial when appeasing the public.