Gamification - CAP 115

For the Advertising and PR (CAP) 115 course session on database searching, I decided to work with Kyle Felker to try to "gamify" it. I'm also reading Shirley Booth's article "On Phenomenography, Learning and Teaching" in Higher Education Research & Development, v.16 no.2, 1997. The basic principles are:

• teachers must draw out learners' understanding, connect to prior knowledge (can also serve as icebreaker); 
• learning is coming to understand something differently after engaging in a learning task, relating examples to the big picture/theory, and reflecting on its meaning; 
• the tasks must be relevant to the learner's world. 
• The teacher has to figure out how the tasks can lead to new perspectives (aka learning). 

So, I will introduce the session with the description of the course, its objectives, the learning outcomes for the day (drawn from my instruction plan for this major) to set the big picture, then do a pre-task quiz to draw out current knowledge (I may use Socrative as a polling tool).

The  Game:
Be the team to find the best (closest to the target number and most relevant) articles for a secondary research paper on "Which cereals do university students eat?"

Rules:
1. Must use databases from the CAP 115 Subject Guide
2. Work in teams; teams score each other
3. Professor and librarian check scores and resolve differences of opinion

Scoring:
Target number of articles closest to (to be determined by students) X = 0-2 points
Relevance = 0-3 points
Used Advanced search option = 0-1 point
Used Boolean Operators AND/OR/NOT = 0-3 points
Used subject headings/words/terms (1 points for each) = 0-3 points
Used other limiters such as truncation or wild cards, date range, quotation marks for phrases, language, or scholarly or peer reviewed (1 points for each type of limiter) = 0-5 points

For a follow-up application of theory to a new problem, I'll have them apply this to Google individually with their own secondary research question.

I'm going to try this out with a couple pairs of library student assistants to try to work the bugs out before classes start. Wish me luck!