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.

CKB

The mission of Community Knowledgebase, LLC is to create a new generation of software for service-learning in American schools and youth programs. We do this through the development of leading-edge civic mapping, social network and educational gaming programs. Our goal is to increase the civic engagement of America’s young people by engaging them in the technologies that are central to their lives.

Community Knowledgebase was founded by Lewis A. Friedland, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and an affiliated professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Friedland earned a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University in 1985; he also founded and directs the Center for Communication and Democracy.

Jen Scott Curwood has worked as a Producer at Community Knowledgebase, in conjunction with EF Games. She has over a decade of teaching experience in K-12 schools and universities, and she has worked to research and develop educational video games and digital media initiatives. She has a Masters in Reading Education and is a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

CIRCLE

CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. CIRCLE provides reliable data and analysis that help Americans to understand the strengths and weaknesses of civic education, broadly defined. Our research has been cited in most national newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, and on CNN, NPR, PBS, MTV, and Fox News. CIRCLE was founded in 2001 with a generous grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and is now also funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and several others. It is based at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

Peter Levine is Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and Research Director ofTufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. In the late 1990s, he was Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by Senator Sam Nunn and William Bennett. Levine is the author of The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (University Press of New England, June 2007), four other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He co-edited Engaging Young People in Civic Life (forthcoming) with James Youniss and The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (2006) with John Gastil, and co-organized the writing of The Civic Mission of Schools, a report released by Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE in 2003. He serves on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Streetlaw, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Kettering Foundation, the J. Paul Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

EFGames

EFGames, LLC is an independent game development and consulting company specializing in the design and assessment of educational computer games.

David Williamson Shaffer, Founder, is a Professor of Learning Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leading expert on educational games. His Masters degree and PhD are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory. His widely-read book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, looks at why and how computer games are good tools for learning in the digital age.

David Hatfield, Director of Technology, has a Masters degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and two decades of experience in educational technology design and implementation.




Elizabeth Sowatzke Bagley, Director of Assessment, has a Masters degree in Educational Psychology and a Masters degree in Environmental Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked as a teacher and developer of educational games.




Padraig Nash, Lead Product Designer, is a graduate of Haverford College and has a decade of experience in implementation of alternative educational programs and in the development of educational games.