GeoSim MigPol is an applet that lets a student study the effects of population growth and migration as it affects congressional apportionment in the United States. As certain states grow in population more quickly than others, the size of their delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives also grows. With MigPol, students can see how current trends in population growth may translate into future political power, or model the effects of alternate scenarios.
The applet requires features of the Java® 2 Platform. In order to run on your browser, you must have the Java Plug-In installed. The plug-in is freely available from Sun's website, and most browsers will ask you if they can download and install it automatically when you attempt to run the applet.
You can also download the entire package and run it locally from your machine as a Java application. This requires the Java Run-time Environment version 1.2 or later to be installed on your machine (which includes the Java Plug-In, for Win32 distributions). The distribution includes all the data files and web pages needed to set the applet up on your own local web server. Simply unzip everything into one directory and read the ReadMe.txt file for instructions on running the application.