Library of Congress civics games: KidCitizen and Eagle Eye Citizen

The three games come from the Library of Congress program Teaching with Primary Sources. In its fiscal 2015 appropriation Congress gave the program extra money to fund competitive grants for online interactives and apps on Congress and civic participation in K-12 classrooms. The Library received 33 proposals from universities, cultural institutions and partnerships in 2015, picked three teams, and announced the finished games in November 2017. A second group of grantees was chosen in 2016.

Each team tested its game with teachers and students, wrote supporting material for professional development and planned outreach to schools. All three games use items from the Library's online collections at loc.gov.

KidCitizen was made by Muzzy Lane Software of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for students in kindergarten through grade 5. Children work through interactive episodes built on primary source photographs. A mentor character guides them to see, think and wonder: zoom in and collect image details, note evidence in a journal, then build posters or timelines that connect what they found to their own lives. The first nine episodes covered what primary sources are, child labor, community helpers, how Congress works and school lunch, among other topics. Teachers could also create and share episodes with cloud tools.

Eagle Eye Citizen came from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Middle and high school students solve and create interactive challenges on American history, civics and government with Library sources, building civic understanding and historical thinking.

Engaging Congress was built by the Indiana University Center on Representative Government in Bloomington. It is a series of game-based activities on the basic tenets of representative government and the problems Congress faces today, with primary source documents tracing how current issues developed. The target group is high school students and their teachers.

All three official sites answer in November 2026. The KidCitizen site presents the episodes as activities for grades K-5 and lists newer ones than the first nine, among them Lighthouses and Our Nation, National Parks and Congress and Milk. It still names the Library of Congress grant as its support.

Eagle Eye Citizen is online as a copy provided by the Roy Rosenzweig Center, with a list of challenges to solve that includes Congressional Firsts and Symbol of Democracy. Engaging Congress calls itself free and says it can be played on the web or installed from the App Store and Google Play on iOS and Android devices.