This document describes plans to develop an interactive information literacy game for freshman orientation at Glenbrook South High School Library. The game aims to introduce students to key concepts like finding information, choosing resources, and search strategies in a fun way. It will have a Trivial Pursuit style format over different categories. Students advance by answering questions correctly. The game is based on an open source information literacy game created by another library and can be easily adapted. The librarians aim to assess the impact of the game on student learning with pre and post assessments.
Game On!: Using Gaming to Promote Information Literacy
1. Kristen Jacobson & John Casey
Glenbrook South High School Library
Glenview, Illinois
2. Improve Freshman Library Orientation and
increase student engagement
Introduce Freshman students to some key
information literacy concepts and skills and
prepare them for their initial research project
Introduce students to the Glenbrook South
Library policies, staff and resources
Keep it light (and ideally, fun)
3.
4.
5.
6. “Better worksheet with good questions”
“More hands on”
“More interesting”
“More computer based”
7. More interactive
More fun for students
More “buy-in” from the students
Opportunity to highlight different
information literacy skills
Immediate feedback
More fun for the librarians and teachers
Research suggests that educational gaming
has a positive effect on learning
8.
9. Trivial Pursuit-style format
5 categories:
Finding Information
Choosing Resources
Search Strategies & Citing Sources
Searching theWeb
Library Policies
Can have 1-4 players
10. Players must answer 2 questions correctly in
each of the 4 main categories
Players receive a “light” for each category
answered
Once all four “lights” are obtained, a player
advances to the Home Stretch
Player must answer one more question from
each category to win
11. Invented by Scott Rice and Amy Harris at the
UNC-Greensboro Libraries
12. Open source
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License
13. Free to share and adapt the content, but you
MUST:
attribute Scott and Amy & link your game back to
their site
use the game for non-commercial purposes only
license your modified game under a similar license
14. At minimum:
Change library logo
Change library name
Change the link on the logo to direct to your
library’s website
Change questions
15. Very few
No expensive software or programming
knowledge required
Existing logo can be copied from your
webpage
Questions can be modified in Notepad
16. What we changed:
board art
question functions
designed a favicon
created custom avatars
feedback survey
20. Original Information Literacy Game hosted
internally
Uses an ASP.NET scripting language that supports
scoring and integrated feedback forms
GBS Library Game hosted externally on Go
Daddy’s servers
Does not include scoring or integrated feedback
forms
21. Apostrophes and ampersands
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
GBS Library’sWebsite
GBS Library'sWebsite
Changing question format
22. Unable to host the site to get quantitative
feedback, so qualitative feedback is essential
GoogleDocs—easy to use, attractive
templates
23. Firefox vs Explorer
Pop-up blocker (works now!)
25. Changing how questions function
Inconsistent feedback
No scoring capability because of hosting
issue
26. STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Concrete feedback (free response)
Easy to update this year
Help from Scott Rice, fix incorporated into his
own version, yay open source!
27. Develop quantitative methods to assess the
impact of the game on student learning
Pre and Post assessments of knowledge of the
content areas (finding information, choosing
resources, searching the web)
28. All of the files and links you need are at:
http://gbslibguides.glenbrook225.org/infolitgame
Kris Jacobson - Librarian
kjacobson@glenbrook225.org
John Casey - Library Lab Manager
jcasey@glenbrook225.org