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.

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.

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.

Legislative Aide is designed to help students in exploring their community, its resources, and their role in civic life. With Legislative Aide, students work in small groups to play legislative aides to a simulated elected official. As a part of the game, players conduct one-on-one interviews with real-life members of their community. Then, within the context of Legislative Aide, players use Youth Map in order to see how resources and information are linked within the community.

To play Legislative Aide in a classroom, each student needs access to a computer with a standard Web browser and an Internet connection. While it is possible to play parts of the game with students sharing a computer, the game has been designed with most activities requiring each student have his or her own computer.

Here’s how the game works. When students first log in to the Legislative Aide game online portal, they are welcomed by the virtual district office manager. This is one of several nonplayer characters within the game that help guide students in performing their legislative aide duties. These nonplayer characters are mostly automated, but teachers can manage them, too. In this way, students’ learning is scaffolded and they receive just-in-time feedback on their performance.

Throughout the game, players receive emails from nonplayer characters. These messages are from their legislator’s district office manager and assistant office manager that direct them to perform certain tasks. In order to simulate what happens within a real legislative office, students can also reply to these emails, to which teachers can then respond as well. It’s important to note that these emails are only exchanged within the game portal, and students cannot send or receive messages to or from outside of the game. As student collect and analyze their data, they engage in various writing activities as well.

Before conducting interviews with real-life community members, students work in small groups to generate a list of questions. Then during the interviews themselves, students take notes; these notes are entered into the Youth Map tool so they can be easily referenced later on. These interviews are critical in allowing students to explore local resources and connect with key community members; through using Youth Map, students can then visualize the links between people, resources, and pressing issues within their community.

Towards the end of the game, students will collaborate with their peers to write a press release about their findings. The culminating activity will involve creating an action plan where they need to synthesize their research, create a plan to address key issues of concern, and support their recommendations with multiple data sources. Teachers are provided with rubrics to help them assess students on both the process and the products that happen within Legislative Aide over the 23 class periods that it runs. This way, teachers can provide students with timely feedback on their performance of tasks as well as on their final products.

In taking on the role of a legislative aide, students are able to develop the cognitive skills and communicative skills of a professional. But because the game doesn’t overwhelm students with too much information and too many tasks all at once, their learning is effectively scaffolded. Through playing Legislative Aide and using the Youth Map tool, students can visualize the links between individuals, organizations, and problems within their community - and in the end, this process is what makes service learning real, tangible, and meaningful.

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.

All classrooms will conduct pre/post tests at the end of May. (The pre/post test administered at the end of March will serve as the pretest for both groups in this second test.) In this way, each classroom will serve as both a treatment and a control group (at different times), which increases the statistical power of the study. As part of this study, we will also conduct classroom observations and focus group interviews with selected teachers.

We are focusing our research in three key areas:

Change in civic understanding and motivation. We will document change in civic understanding and motivation to engage in service by analyzing change on pre-post items that includes a bank of civic knowledge and motivation items developed by Joe Kahne at Mills College.

Teacher response to the intervention. We will analyze teacher responses to daily ratings of the curriculum included in the software, and perform a qualitative analysis of teacher responses in focus groups.

Student response to the intervention. We will analyze student responses to the intervention through classroom observations, by analyzing questions about the intervention that are included in the post interview, and by analyzing teacher’s ratings of student enjoyment and engagement collected daily by the software.

Epistemic games take advantage of these new capacities to teach the knowledge, skills, identities, and values that adult professionals use when they learn how to become graphic artists (Shaffer, 1997), bio-engineers, architects, and journalists. Youth Map models the complex skills of civic professionals while recognizing that the skills of citizenship go well beyond professional skills (Sirianni & Friedland, 2001).

Legislative Aide will model each of these skills of citizenship by bringing them into the classroom and then connecting students to the civic world outside. Using skills that are drawn from the working world of civic professionals and citizens, students practice these skills in ways that allow them to build civic skills, knowledge, identities, and values. Each of these skills will be developed through using Legislative Aide.

Currently, we are in the process of researching the use of Legislative Aide - and its social networking platform, Youth Map - in diverse public school settings. Our hypothesis is that Legislative Aide leads both directly and indirectly to service learning in classrooms.

First, as students address a problem over the course of the curriculum, we hypothesize that students’ understanding of that problem will increase in multiple dimensions. They will be come familiar with many aspects of the problem that were almost certainly unfamiliar as well as the connections among these issues. They will gain a richer knowledge of the network of community institutions engaged in addressing that problem. And they will become directly knowledgeable through active discovery of the repertoire that local institutions and citizens are using to address it.

Second, we expect that students’ motivations to engage in community service generally, and on the problem they have worked on, will significantly increase, leading as Kahne and Sporte have shown to increased likelihood of civic engagement after high school.

Third, the students’ presentation of their work to the larger community, either through face-to-face meetings or web publication, is itself a form of service that both produces goods of public value and visibly and directly increases the civic engagement of young people in the local community.

Fourth, a final module will offer a series of steps for teachers and students who want to continue doing direct service on the problem they have explored as school based service or individual voluntary action