Another example of imaginative use of technology to interest people in what is often seen as “boring” material. Supreme court cases have outcomes that have impacts on real people. I haven’t played but suspect participant gain a lot of knowledge about the facts and law in each case.
Not to mention that there are monthly drawings for $200 Amazon gift certificates. See the site for details.
From the about page:
FantasySCOTUS is the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. Last year, over 5,000 attorneys, law students, and other avid Supreme Court followers made predictions about all cases that the Supreme Court decided. On average, members of the league correctly predicted the cases nearly 60% of the time, and accurately predicted that Elena Kagan would be nominated as the 100th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Justin Donoho, who received the highest score out of 5,000+ members, was nominated and confirmed as the inaugural Chief Justice of FantasySCOTUS.
FantasySCOTUS is brought to you by the Harlan Institute. The Harlan Institute’s mission is to bring a stylized law school experience into the high school classroom to ensure that our next generation of leaders has a proper understanding of our most fundamental laws. By utilizing the expertise of leading legal scholars and the interactivity of online games, Harlan will introduce students to our Constitution, the cases of the United States Supreme Court, and our system of justice. Harlan’s long term strategic goal is to develop condensed law school courses that can be taught at no cost in high schools across the country using engaging online programs.
This and the Crowdsourcing Scientific Research I mentioned yesterday make me think that perhaps TREC in 2012 should have a crowdsourced component. Where the data set is available over the WWW and interfaces are proposed and tested to interest the general public in participating. What was that they said about all bugs being shallow if you just had enough eyes?
Up to now, TREC has had a small set of eyes with very powerful machines and algorithms. Would be interesting to see what a crowd, plus imaginative interface and fast interaction could do? Could be a path towards a distributed knowledge economy where users log onto tasks/interfaces that interest them.