Lectures on geometric realizations of crystals

These are notes for a lecture series given at the Fields Institute Summer School in Geometric Representation Theory and Extended Affine Lie Algebras, held at the University of Ottawa in June 2009. We give an introduction to the geometric realization of crystal graphs via the quiver varieties of Lusztig and Nakajima. The emphasis is on motivating the constructions through concrete examples. The relation between the geometric construction of crystals and combinatorial realizations using Young tableaux is also discussed.