Simulating a Federal Legislature

Abstract This article describes implementation of an online learning tool designed to complement traditional didactic teaching. LegSim is a web-based virtual legislature that students organize and operate. They represent constituents, choose leaders and allocate committee positions, sponsor, co-sponsor, and research legislation, and negotiate and strategize to advance their policy priorities. Instruction is flexibly adapted to changing events as students acquire conceptual, procedural, and operational knowledge through their participation in a learning community. Introduction I hear and l forget. I see and 1 remember. I do and I understand. K'ung-fu-tzu, Chinese philosopher & reformer (551 BC-479 BC) Advances in communication technologies and media have dramatically influenced economics, politics, and society in recent decades. These advances have had less impact on teaching practices, in part, because there are few technological innovations designed to serve the needs of educators, particularly in the social sciences. Thus, social science instruction remains primarily a didactic, book-centered process. In this article, we argue that computer-based simulations offer qualitatively different tools for supporting student-centered, experiential learning in the social sciences, two factors identified as important for promoting learning in the fields of engineering, science, and medicine (Bransford et al. 2000). Despite growing claims about the educational benefits of games and simulations (Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2001; Sawyer, 2002), many educators are understandably skeptical. Drawing on our own experiences over the past 5 years, we can begin to describe the affordances of a particular web-based legislative simulation, and why we believe simulations will be increasingly important in future social science education. Games and Simulations Both games and simulations seek to model some type of dynamic system, either real or imagined, and therefore, can be defined as a collection of related parts, which, through interactions with each other, function together to create a complex whole (Kauffman, 1980; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). Games, such as chess and Go, are thousands of years old, and motivate play because they offer clear goals, multiple ways to win, some learner-control, and the possibility of proficiency through repetition (Malone, 1980; Gredler, 2004). Games typically are goal-driven, and can be highly abstract or fantasy-based. In contrast, simulations are open-ended, and usually, realistic representations of some aspect of the real world. In such experiential simulations, a scenario is presented, players assume roles, and decisions are made as a situation unfolds over time (Gredler, 2004). Kriegsspiel, designed by Prussian lieutenant yon Reisswitz in 1824, was the first attempt to represent realistic battlefield situations (Bonk & Dennen, 2005; von Reisswitz, 1824). Case-based simulations have been traditionally used in law and medicine; as early as 1926, college students created a simulation of the League of Nations that later became the popular Model United Nations widely used in middle and high schools, and colleges today (Muldoon, 1995). Technological advances during the Second World War introduced new ways to instantiate games and simulations using the computer's computational speed and programmable functionality. Social scientists developed some of the earliest computer simulations for the purpose of studying economic behavior based on formal game theory (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944). After the Second World War, computer-based simulations were used to study problems in business, meteorology, defense, and numerous other fields, where experiments were not physically, financially, or ethically feasible, but could be mathematically modeled (Forrester, 1961; Levenson, 1989; Shubik, 1982). Gredler (2004) refers to these as symbolic simulations. …