Students predict the outcome of the U.S. election
2020-10-16 The U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2020
Lüneburg/Berlin. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are engaged in a close race for the election of the 46th U.S. President. More than 5,000 German and American students want to know in advance who will be in the lead on November 3. Since the beginning of the school year, they have been busy in their English courses to correctly predict the outcome of the election. The nationwide school project was initiated by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. The course content and learning design were developed by Joannis Kaliampos and Professor Torben Schmidt from the Institute of English Studies at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. The students' election forecast will be published on November 2 on www.teachaboutus.org.
Each participating class was assigned a U.S. state. An interactive and web-based learning platform connects the participating classes directly with American partner schools. Discussions with students and experts via zoom, e-mail and social media open up the classroom and allow direct insights into local opinion formation. Students work through content aspects of the history, politics, economy, demographics, society, and the local and regional media landscape of the respective U.S. states in such a way that at the end they can make a well-founded and creatively designed election forecast for their state.
The U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2020 is a further development of a project already organized by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections, some of which produced extremely accurate election forecasts. The innovative curriculum for the project was developed by a project team from the U.S. Embassy, the Berlin educational organization LIFE e.V. and the Institute of English Studies at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. With the support of the Transatlantic Outreach Program at the Goethe-Institut in Washington D.C., it was possible to network school classes with American partner schools, thus enabling a direct transatlantic exchange of information in the election project.