Info Lit Game

Kristen Jacobson & John Casey
Glenbrook South High School Library
Glenview, Illinois

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)
“Better worksheet with good questions”
“More hands on”
“More interesting”
“More computer based”







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


Trivial Pursuit-style format
5 categories:
Finding Information
Choosing Resources
Search Strategies & Citing Sources
Searching the Web
Library Policies

Can have 1-4 players




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
Invented by Scott Rice and Amy Harris at the
UNC-Greensboro Libraries
Open source
 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License
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
At minimum:
 Change library logo
 Change library name
 Change the link on the logo to direct to your
library’s website
 Change questions

Very few 

No expensive software or programming
knowledge required

Existing logo can be copied from your
webpage

Questions can be modified in Notepad

What we changed:
 board art
 question functions
 designed a favicon
 created custom avatars
 feedback survey





logos
question content
board art
favicon
avatars
Otaku Avatar Maker
This is the one we used. It is good for creating
simple, manga style characters.
Create a Mii
Create your own Nintendo Wii-style "Mii"
characters. Not affiliated with Nintendo Co.
Ltd.
Minimizer
Make "lego" minifigure avatars. Not affiliated
with the LEGO Group ©.
MadMen Yourself
Make early 60s style Madmen avatars. Very
cute. The head-shots are distinctive even when
made quite small and are popular avatars on
Twitter.

Photo/Image editing software
 Microsoft Paint
 Adobe Photoshop
 Free Software:
 GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program)
 Picnik

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

Apostrophes and ampersands
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
GBS Library’s Website
GBS Library's Website

Changing question format

Unable to host the site to get quantitative
feedback, so qualitative feedback is essential

GoogleDocs—easy to use, attractive
templates

Firefox vs Explorer

Pop-up blocker (works now!)

THE DREADED NULL SET

Changing how questions function

Inconsistent feedback

No scoring capability because of hosting
issue

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Concrete feedback (free response)

Easy to update this year

Help from Scott Rice, fix incorporated into his
own version, yay open source!

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)
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