Info Lit Game

Kristen Jacobson & John Casey
Glenbrook South High School Library
Glenview, Illinois
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Improve Freshman Library Orientation and
increase student engagement
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Introduce Freshman students to some key
information literacy concepts and skills and
prepare them for their initial research project
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Introduce students to the Glenbrook South
Library policies, staff and resources
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Keep it light (and ideally, fun)
“Better worksheet with good questions”
“More hands on”
“More interesting”
“More computer based”
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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
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Trivial Pursuit-style format
5 categories:
Finding Information
Choosing Resources
Search Strategies & Citing Sources
Searching the Web
Library Policies
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Can have 1-4 players
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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
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Very few 
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No expensive software or programming
knowledge required
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Existing logo can be copied from your
webpage
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Questions can be modified in Notepad
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What we changed:
 board art
 question functions
 designed a favicon
 created custom avatars
 feedback survey
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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.
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Photo/Image editing software
 Microsoft Paint
 Adobe Photoshop
 Free Software:
 GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program)
 Picnik
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Original Information Literacy Game hosted
internally
 Uses an ASP.NET scripting language that supports
scoring and integrated feedback forms
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GBS Library Game hosted externally on Go
Daddy’s servers
 Does not include scoring or integrated feedback
forms
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Apostrophes and ampersands
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
Magazine & Newspaper Databases
GBS Library’s Website
GBS Library's Website
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Changing question format
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Unable to host the site to get quantitative
feedback, so qualitative feedback is essential
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GoogleDocs—easy to use, attractive
templates
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Firefox vs Explorer
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Pop-up blocker (works now!)
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THE DREADED NULL SET
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Changing how questions function
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Inconsistent feedback
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No scoring capability because of hosting
issue
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STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
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Concrete feedback (free response)
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Easy to update this year
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Help from Scott Rice, fix incorporated into his
own version, yay open source!
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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
[email protected]
John Casey - Library Lab Manager
[email protected]