Extracurricular learning programs in which law students take part in simulated trials competing with other students. Moot court helps students to learn how to analyze legal issues; the goal is to teach students the practical side of practicing law. Participants are usually divided in two or more teams. Each team receives a detailed description of an hypothetical fact scenario that raises one or more legal issues. Teams have to face off issues as if they were lawyers or advocates for one or sometimes both of the parties submitting written briefs, participating in oral argument or both.
Published in Chapter:
Emerging Paradigms in Legal Education: A Learning Environment to Teach Law through Online Role Playing Games
Nicola Lettieri (Institute for Development of Vocational Training, Italy), Ernesto Fabiani (Università del Sannio, Italy), Antonella Tartaglia Polcini (Università del Sannio, Italy), Rosario De Chiara (Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy), and Vittorio Scarano (Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-495-0.ch047
Abstract
Over the last years, despite few exceptions, legal education has dropped behind in the use of digital game-based learning methods. Law schools essentially still resort to traditional lectures even though there are evidences that computer gaming simulations can represent an effective practice for both teaching theoretical concepts of law and for training students in acquiring legal skills. This chapter presents a research that is aimed at developing/trying out a new method for legal education based on the use of SGs. Simulex, a learning environment for the creation of on line role playing games simulating trials, will be presented. The main focus of the chapter will be on the analysis of the specific needs of legal education and on describing how these needs have been matched by the development of the project, from the design to the testing phase. Some user testing has been carried out in the specific case of an experimental class of civil procedure law, for undergraduate students. The second part of the work will describe the results of the testing from a didactical, methodological, and technical point of view, also sketching future developments of the experimentation.