FLIPPING THE FIRST YEAR EXPERIENCE: USING MOBILE SCAVENGER HUNTS TO ORIENT STUDENTS TO LIBRARY RESOURCES

Presented by Jennifer Collins

Reference and Instruction Librarian

SUNY Delhi

collinjg@delhi.edu

WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM? SUNY Delhi wanted to create a new library

tour for new student orientation and freshman seminar classes.

Old tour was boring for students AND librarians

SOLUTION Create a scavenger hunt where students will

work in teams in order to orient themselves to the library resources.

LIBRARY TOUR NEEDS Orient students to the Resnick Library and

Learning Center Group based and active Able to scale for large and small groupsCover the same talking points as the

traditional tourCreate opportunities for students to get

“face time” with multiple librarians and staff members

Scale for both short and longer amounts of time

DEVELOPING THE HUNT What are other libraries doing?

Found multiple examples of non-traditional library tours. QR codes Video tours Self guided walk-arounds Scavenger hunts

North Carolina State University has a mobile scavenger hunt

that was used as a template for the Resnick Scavenger hunt.

RESNICK HUNT VS UCSU

Uses Twitter and student owned smart phones to submit answers

Has students use Evernote and library owned iPod touches to submit answers

Scores kept in real time using google spread sheets

Scores kept in real time using google spread sheets

Faculty have a variety of different discipline focused scavenger hunts to choose from

Faculty can request one standard scavenger hunt for their students

Two librarians – one on-site and the other online keep score and interact with students

One librarian facilitates the scavenger hunt

Librarians meet with faculty after the scavenger hunt to discuss results

Unsure what UCSU follow-up is

Team based Team based

SETTING UP TEAMS

KEEPING SCORE

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… THE ORIGINAL TOUR BULLETS

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… HUNT QUESTIONS MARC 1

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… HUNT QUESTIONS MARC 2

MARC 2

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… HUNT QUESTIONS

MARC 3

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… HUNT QUESTIONS

MARC 4

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS… FOR DIFFERENT

DISCIPLINES

Since starting the basic scavenger hunt we have also added options for Veterinary science, Nursing and Culinary students.

SOME EARLY ISSUES… Students had trouble signing onto twitter Students had issues getting into group Students had difficulty formatting questions correctly

(@resnicklibrary Question #: Answer) In large groups it was hard for a single librarian

facilitator to track student answers, correct false answers and offer further information and interactive feed back to students

SO…. Another librarian, based online, was brought

on to work in tandem with on-sight facilitator

EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD TUTORIAL! A power point tutorial was created to be

shown at the beginning of each scavenger hunt session.

Teams were also required to post a “test tweet” and could only begin the hunt once they had received a

successful reply tweet from the online facilitator.

SOME THINGS WE’VE DISCOVERED What faculty prioritize for students to learn from the

tour is often different from what the librarians prioritize.

No matter how many points we award for the reference section question students rarely answer it.

The questions students answer tend to dove tail with our statistics about the library services they use most often.

Students sometimes come up with infinitely creative answers.

SOME IDEAS FOR ASSESSMENT

Offer a pre test and post test on library resources.

Try and track freshman seminar students who did the hunt and see if they return for reference sessions.

ANY QUESTIONS?