Academics
DistrictForge
The same votes, redrawn, can hand one side twice the seats. DistrictForge shows how winner-take-all districts turn a 55% vote into all 5 seats — or just 2 — depending on who draws the lines, through packing and cracking. Predict the seats, then measure the gerrymander with the efficiency gap argued before the Supreme Court. Non-partisan (Violet vs Orange), all exact, all on your device. Ages 15–18.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 25 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
#4b5fa6 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
DistrictForge is for ages 15–18 — no illustrated cast; the 'characters' are the pieces of a districting map, played by two synthetic parties (Violet and Orange, non-partisan by construction). A district is winner-take-all, so a party's share of the seats can be nothing like its share of the votes. Packing concentrates an opponent into a few landslide districts, wasting their surplus votes; cracking spreads them thin so they lose everywhere by a little, wasting all of them. The efficiency gap — one party's wasted votes minus the other's, over all votes — turns 'this map feels unfair' into a number, the metric argued in Gill v. Whitford (above ~7% flags a likely gerrymander). Every value is exact integer arithmetic computed on-device.
The district
Winner-take-all — whoever gets the most votes takes the whole seat, so surplus votes for a winner and every vote for a loser elect no one
Packing
Drawing an opponent into a few districts they win in a landslide, so their extra votes pile up wasted and win no additional seats
Cracking
Splitting an opponent across many districts so they fall just short in each — wasting all their votes while winning nothing
The efficiency gap
Wasted votes, counted — one party's wasted votes minus the other's, over all votes; a gap above about 7% was argued in Gill v. Whitford to flag a likely gerrymander
What's inside
Learning goal
The same votes, redrawn, can hand one side twice the seats. DistrictForge shows how winner-take-all districts turn a 55% vote into all 5 seats — or just 2 — depending on who draws the lines, through packing and cracking. Predict the seats, then measure the gerrymander with the efficiency gap argued before the Supreme Court. Non-partisan (Violet vs Orange), all exact, all on your device. Ages 15–18.
How DistrictForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages