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.

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)

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

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

17.  logos
 question content
 board art
 favicon
 avatars

18. 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 ©.
MadMenYourself
Make early 60s style Madmen avatars. Very
cute.The head-shots are distinctive even when
made quite small and are popular avatars on
Twitter.

19.  Photo/Image editing software
 Microsoft Paint
 Adobe Photoshop
 Free Software:
 GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program)
 Picnik

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!)

24.  THE DREADED NULL SET

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