Eric Keylor – Our Courts: Learning Civics through Games

Since the beginning of video games, there has always been interest in using video games for learning. Now, a perfect storm of technology, social media, and learning science is making the development of video games for deep learning more feasible than ever. During this talk, we will explore the learning principles behind good video games, and we will discuss the design, development, and future vision of Guardian of Law, a game to teach civics to middle school students that was initiated by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as part of the Our Courts project. Eric Keylor is a Ph.D. student in Educational Technology at Arizona State University and is currently on the Our Courts design and development team. He studied music at Yale University and has a Master’s of Entertainment Technology from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. While at Carnegie Mellon, he was on the development team for PeaceMaker, a turn-based strategy game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In late 2007, the Peres Center for Peace distributed 100,000 copies of PeaceMaker in Israel and the Palestinian territories and committed to providing teacher support for the use of PeaceMaker in Israeli and Palestinian schools.