BILL: Become Law — Turning How a Bill Becomes a Law Into a Video Game

How a bill becomes a law is one of the most taught topics in American Government, and one of the easiest to make boring. The textbook version is a flowchart. My version is a video game.

The idea. In BILL: Become Law, you play as Bill, a small piece of legislation trying to survive. Like an old Atari-style platformer in the spirit of Pitfall, Bill runs, jumps, and dodges hazards across three levels. Each level is one stage of the lawmaking process: the House, the Senate, and the White House. Make it to the door at the end of a level, and the bill moves on. Fail, and the bill dies with a themed ending. In the House, for example, a failed bill gets "TABLED."

The inspiration came from two places. One was my own experience with classic side-scrolling games. The other was seeing how popular browser games like Fireboy and Watergirl on Cool Math Games are, where you guide characters through level after level of obstacles. Those games already feel like a journey through a system with rules and gatekeepers. That's exactly what a bill goes through.

Why build a game that isn't academically rigorous? I'll be honest: this game won't teach the details of committee markups or conference committees. That isn't its job. A lot of my activities are built to create an experience, a shared memory that the actual lesson can build on. Once everyone has played through the House, the Senate, and the White House as Bill, the real discussion has something to stand on. "Why was the Senate level harder?" and "What does a veto look like in real life?" are much easier conversations when the whole room has already lived a version of it.

I think of it as scaffolding. The game gives the basic premise and the theme of the lesson: a bill has to survive three separate tests, and it can fail at any of them. The lesson and discussion do the rigorous work on top of that foundation.

There's another reason too. Activities like this make a classroom a place people want to be. Social studies doesn't have to be worksheets and textbook chapters every day. When a lesson starts with something fun and memorable, the rest of the class has momentum.

How we built it with AI. The game is a single HTML file, a little over 1,300 lines of code, and I didn't write any of it by hand. I work with Claude, an AI assistant, to build and refine my classroom games. The game already had a working physics engine, custom pixel art for each level, sound effects generated in code, and a system that logs each attempt to a spreadsheet for my gradebook. This round of work was about making it look better without changing how it plays.

The first thing we learned is that reading code isn't the same as seeing the game. Claude set up a way to actually run the game in a hidden browser, play into specific levels, and take screenshots, including zoomed-in close-ups of individual sprites. That's when the real problems showed up.

SCREENSHOT GOES HERE: House level before the fixes

What we found in the House level. Bill was nearly invisible. He's a small cream-colored paper sprite, and the House level was full of cream and maroon columns and walls, so he blended right in. The whole level was one color family, so hazards didn't stand out. A row of spikes appeared to float in midair with nothing holding them up. And there was a pit the player couldn't see until they were already falling into it.

The fixes took more than one try. This is the part I want other teachers to understand, because building with AI isn't magic, and it isn't one-and-done.

The black pit tiles became a paper shredder, which fits the theme of a bill getting killed. The first version didn't look like a shredder at all. It looked like a picket fence or piano keys, because the paper strips were too even. The second version made the strips uneven and added jagged teeth, which worked better. Later, I decided I liked it without the teeth, so we took them back out.

The floating spikes got a small wooden ledge underneath them so they look mounted instead of hovering. The first version of the ledge had small corner brackets that looked like extra spikes, so those came off.

The trickiest problem was a gap in the floor where a green background pattern showed through. It took three attempts. The first attempt filled the gap with a flat maroon color, which just made a different-colored patch. The second attempt matched the brick floor perfectly, and that made things worse, because the gap now looked exactly like solid ground. A player would walk onto it and fall through with no warning. The third attempt kept the original checker pattern but recolored it with maroon tones from the game's own brick palette, so it looks intentional without hiding the danger.

SCREENSHOT GOES HERE: House level after the fixes

The biggest lesson: looking good and playing fair aren't the same thing. The "perfect" brick match was the most polished fix and the worst one for the game. A player has to be able to see danger to avoid it. That's a design lesson I wouldn't have thought about without seeing each version on screen.

A few practical tricks. Every student has to fill out a sign-in form before the game starts, which slowed down testing. So we made a separate test copy with a preview mode that skips the form and jumps straight to any level. The real game file never got that shortcut. We also learned to republish the game after every single change. At one point a fix was made but never republished, and we spent time wondering why it "didn't work."

The other levels. The Senate level already worked well visually, since Bill stands out clearly against its blue color scheme. One problem is still on the list: the Senate has an alligator-jaw bridge hazard that doesn't really look like an alligator. Closed, it looks like a treasure chest, and open, it looks like a plain wooden plank. The White House level, with its VETO-stamped blocks that crash down from the ceiling, was approved with no changes.

If you want to try something like this, start with the lesson's basic idea and ask what game it already resembles. A bill becoming a law is a character trying to survive a series of levels. Once you see that, the game almost designs itself. Then plan on building it in rounds, and look at every version before you decide it's done.

You can play BILL: Become Law for free on my games page. Try getting Bill through all three levels yourself before you use it in class.