AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Amazon Aurora

iCivics

Using digital games to teach civics

iCivics is the education nonprofit that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded in 2009 to transform civic education and rebuild civic strength through digital games and lesson plans. It is the country’s largest provider of civic education content and is currently used by more than 120,500 educators and 7.6 million students annually. All of its games are free, nonpartisan, and available at www.icivics.org. Through their use of Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS CodeDeploy—and AWS security automation tools including AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon GuardDuty—iCivics has been able to scale and increase student engagement.

flag in front of government building

Scaling to share unprecedented volume of election donation data, quickly and cost-effectively

Campaign contributions have grown exponentially in the United States. In 1980, there were around 500,000 contributions made; in 2020 alone, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) expects 500 million contributions. Meanwhile, the evolution of technology has changed the way Americans contribute to political campaigns, making it easier to make many small contributions. To meet unprecedented demand for data transparency, the FEC turned to the cloud.