More than 100 middle school students will gather at Mount Vernon September 18, 2023, to play Constitutional Compromise. Thousands of students will attend the event via livestream. The in-person event and livestream are open to the media.

MOUNT VERNON, VA – September 7, 2023 – This Constitution Day, iCivics and George Washington’s Mount Vernon will release Constitutional Compromise, a new online game that takes students through the major issues - and key compromises - that shaped our nation’s governing charter, the United States Constitution. 

Developed with support from philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin, Constitutional Compromise is the first game that iCivics has created specifically for use within a museum exhibit. The game will be available for free for anyone to use at icivics.org, and it will be available for on-site play to the over one million visitors to Mount Vernon every year. By 2026, the game will move into a new permanent exhibit on George Washington at Mount Vernon.

Designed for middle and high school students, the game places students in Philadelphia in 1787 and challenges students to grapple with the intense debates that occurred between the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, including: the scope of national government, representation of power, how population is determined, executive functions, the transatlantic slave trade, and whether the country should have a Bill of Rights.

George Washington, who served as President of the Constitutional Convention, leads players through the debates by requiring them to weigh the arguments they hear and decide how they might have moved forward if they were writing the Constitution. The game then compares their decisions with the compromises that delegates had to make to create a new system of self-government, even though they were difficult and sometimes imperfect (and, on the issue of slavery, morally unacceptable). 

It was built by award-winning educational games developer Filament Games. It is free to use and is also available in Spanish and with full support for English Language Learners and has supporting documents for educators to use during Constitution Week and beyond to teach about the Constitution.

More than 100 students from the Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C. will gather on Sept. 18 at Mount Vernon, President Washington’s home, for an event that will be live streamed to thousands of students across the country, starting at 9:30 AM EST. The livestream will be available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7T7ImWrpgs

"Now more than ever it's critical that Americans have a firm grounding in the important framework that the U.S. Constitution provides for our democracy,” Mount Vernon President & CEO Doug Bradburn said. “Mount Vernon is delighted to have the perfect partner in iCivics as we worked together to create Constitutional Compromise.”