Designing Games That Teach Through Play, with iCivics
Creating educational games and tools that transformed complex learning objectives into intuitive experiences, helping millions of students build civic knowledge through play.
Company: Filament Games
Client: iCivics
Role: Lead UX Designer and Art Director across multiple iCivics products, concept through launch
iCivics was founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to change how students learn civics, not by having them memorize how government works, but by having them experience it. Working with Filament Games, I helped design multiple games and learning tools that turned civics concepts into interaction design problems. The work contributed to a platform that now reaches more than 9 million students a year, supports 145,000 teachers, and has passed 200 million total plays.
The Challenge
iCivics believes students learn civics best by doing it, not reading about it. That belief creates a hard product problem. An educational game has to be genuinely fun to play and still teach something real. Lean too far toward education and you get a quiz with graphics. Lean too far toward entertainment and kids have a good time without learning anything.
At Filament we had a name for the failure mode, chocolate covered broccoli, a game that wraps ordinary instruction in game mechanics without actually changing how the learning happens. Every project started with the same question. How do you design an interaction where the act of playing is what teaches the lesson, not a quiz bolted onto the end of it.
There's a second, quieter kind of stake on a project like this too. iCivics operates as a trusted, non-partisan resource in classrooms across the country. A product that felt biased, sloppy, or careless would cost more than a bad review, it would cost the trust the whole platform depends on.
The Approach
Filament staffed each project with a small, cross-functional pod, one lead per discipline. On more than ten of these projects I was the lead UX designer, responsible for interaction design end to end and for art directing the illustration team, and I supported bringing new designers up to speed through hiring and portfolio review as the team grew.
I worked as lead UX designer across multiple iCivics titles, partnering closely with game designers to turn a learning objective into a full product experience, from early interaction models and paper prototypes through visual systems, implementation, and final delivery.
We started with behavior, not features. If a student needed to understand a concept, the interaction itself had to require understanding it, not just testing for it afterward.
On Immigration Nation, the easy version was a multiple choice quiz asking students to identify eligibility requirements. I proposed something different, a navigation system where players plot a route guiding an immigrant ship safely to the correct port of entry. That single interaction did more than replace a quiz screen. It created a system that scaled naturally as the lesson got harder, obstacles, route optimization, more complex eligibility rules, all without breaking the core loop.
The same thinking carried across the other titles I worked on, interactive writing tools like Drafting Board, and games like Do I Have a Right? and Win the White House. Different mechanics, same underlying goal, make the learning emerge from playing rather than from being told. Across every title, I also owned the design system that held it together, type, color, components, and interaction states, built to be reused rather than reinvented on each new project.
Key Decisions
Problem. The easy version of Immigration Nation was a multiple choice quiz dressed up with illustrations, the chocolate covered broccoli trap.
Decision. Replace the quiz with a route planning interaction, where getting it right meant successfully navigating the ship, not selecting an option from a list.
Tradeoff. A harder interaction to build and balance than a quiz screen, but one that scaled naturally into obstacles and puzzle mechanics as the lesson increased in complexity.
Problem. Every project could easily start from features or interface first, the fastest path to shipping something that looks like a finished game.
Decision. Push each project to start from the target student behavior instead, and only design interface and mechanics once that behavior was clearly defined.
Tradeoff. A slower discovery phase on every project, but interactions that reinforced the actual lesson instead of decorating it.
Outcome
The products helped establish iCivics as one of the most widely used civic education platforms in the country. Today it reaches more than 9 million students a year, supports 145,000 teachers, and has passed 200 million total game plays. Ninety five percent of teachers say iCivics is a trusted, non-partisan resource, the kind of outcome that only holds up if the product itself earns it. A 2021 study of 37,000 students found that after playing iCivics games, scores on civics content questions rose by an average of 26 percent, and scores on questions about civic dispositions and behaviors rose by 38 percent. Separately, students who used Drafting Board were 62 percent more likely to write essays rated excellent than students who completed the same assignment without it.
That principle, that the interaction itself has to teach, not just decorate a lesson, shaped every project I worked on there and still shapes how I approach product design today.