Our Partnership

The development of Legislative Aide was made possible by the collaboration of Community Knowledgebase, EFGames, and Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Youth Map creator and Principal Investigator Lewis Friedland had collaborated with CIRCLE Director Peter Levine for about a decade when, in 2006, Levine and Friedland saw the opportunity to build and use Youth Map (which Friedland had been experimenting with since 2001) to build high quality service learning software for young people who were spending more and more time with new technology.

Friedland approached his colleague at the UW-Madison, David Williamson Shaffer, an internationally recognized expert on the use of computers in education. Friedland worked with Shaffer and his team of Ph.D. students, David Hatfield, Padraig Nash, and Elizabeth Sowatzki Bagley, to build the first version of the Youth Map curriculum, which was tested in Baltimore in 2007 under the field direction of Abigail Kiesa of CIRCLE. There, students mapped the complex problem of improving education, which took them to every level of local, county, state and federal government. From that, the idea for Legislative Aide was born.