# Political Science — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 01 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
In one 90-minute session, hand each student a printed one-page summary of a live Hawaiʻi bill (pull one from capitol.hawaii.gov the morning of class). First 20 minutes: students silently write a stake map — three columns for who wins, who loses, and who is absent from the text entirely. Next 40 minutes: in pairs, one student runs the stakeholder-simulator prompt on a phone or laptop while the other keeps a tally sheet of every claim the AI's lobbyist or agency head makes that they cannot verify against the actual bill text in front of them. Last 30 minutes: each pair reports the single most consequential unverifiable claim and names who benefits if the room believes it. No fabrication, no accounts, no prep beyond reading this page — the graded artifact is the tally sheet, not the transcript.

## The assignment
**Make it (Laser cut · engrave).** Students cut a real Hawaiʻi district or precinct as movable tiles, then physically redraw the boundaries to satisfy competing constraints (population equality, community of interest, incumbent protection). The map stops being an abstraction the moment they have to move a piece and tell the room who they just moved.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** A stakeholder simulator for a bill actually moving through the Hawaiʻi legislature. The AI plays a lobbyist, an agency head, and a constituent group in turn; students have to get a provision through and then account for what they traded away.

## 4-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Pick one live bill from the current session and the Hawaiʻi district it touches. Students write a one-page stake map — who wins, who loses, who is invisible in the text — and mark the real precinct boundaries their movable tiles will use.
- **Wk 2.** Submit the cut file for the district base tiles at the start of the week so fabrication runs in parallel. Build and run the stakeholder simulator in class; students log the three moments the AI’s stakeholder said something they could not verify against the actual record. That log is the graded artifact, not the transcript.
- **Wk 3.** The tiles come back from fabrication. Students draft the written defense of the map they intend to argue.
- **Wk 4.** Physical redraw session and public defense. Each team hands their tiles to another team, who must find the choice that cannot be justified.

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The end-of-term policy analysis paper, where students pick a bill and argue for or against it in twelve to fifteen pages.
- **What is lost:** The sustained written argument and the citation practice a long paper builds.
- **What is gained:** Students confront the bill as a contested negotiation among real parties instead of a thesis to defend, and they practice the harder civic skill of catching a confident, well-formatted claim the record does not support.

## Where AI is bad at this
Asked to speak for a stakeholder in a specific bill, the model invents plausible legislative history — a committee amendment, a fiscal note, a prior vote count — with the exact texture of the real record and no basis in it. It will confidently attribute a position to an agency or caucus that never took one, because the shape of the claim is more available to it than the Hawaiʻi-specific fact.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Stake map completeness | 20% | Identifies winners, losers, and the parties the bill's text renders invisible, with the invisible party named specifically rather than gestured at. |
| Verification against the record | 35% | Each flagged AI claim is checked against the actual bill or public record; the log distinguishes 'unsupported' from 'contradicted' and cites where it looked. |
| Consequence reasoning | 25% | Explains who benefits if an unverified claim is believed, connecting the fabrication to a real distributive stake. |
| Defense under challenge | 20% | When another team attacks the student's own map, the student defends the choices that are defensible and concedes the one that is not. |

## Starter prompt
> You are running a legislative negotiation simulation for an undergraduate political science class. I will give you a bill. Play three stakeholders in turn: a paid lobbyist for the affected industry, a state agency director who has to implement it, and a community group that was not consulted. Stay in character, push back hard, and do not concede quickly. After each exchange, stop and ask me what I am willing to give up. Do not summarize or break character unless I type PAUSE. The bill is: [paste bill text or summary here].

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 2 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $6–9 per student in laser stock **[unverified]** if the four-week district-tile build is run.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 2 — cut the district base tiles from the district chosen in week 1. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), so a start-of-week-2 file clears with two weeks to spare before the week-4 redraw and defense.
- **Calendar dependency:** The AI portion needs no lead time. The tiles are just the base precinct map, designable as soon as the district is chosen in week 1, so their file goes in at the start of week 2 — the up-to-14-calendar-day cut turnaround clears before the week-4 defense.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute stake-map plus verification-tally session above; no fabrication.
- **4 weeks:** The seeded four-week plan: stake map, simulator run and verification log, cut-file submission, then the physical redraw and public defense.
- **One semester:** Track one bill from introduction to its actual fate, running the simulator at each hearing stage with a running verification log, and fabricate a district model for the districting-related bills; the final artifact is a defensible redistricting proposal presented to a mock neighborhood board.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_