Playing games to learn things is increasingly popular – and what can be better than making learning fun? Good instruction always means reaching out to your learners where they are, and working to connect the information you have to share in a way that speaks to them. Games can be a great tool for this!

In every kind of library, we need to work with our community members to help them build information literacy skills. This just sounds dull on the face of it, so making it fun with a game is a wonderful idea.

Minitex has made this a reality! They have a fun game called Information Fallout, designed to build information literacy skills.

“Information Fallout is a narrative-based learning tool designed to introduce information literacy skills to students….[It] sets out six learning objectives for students. These are assessed by a series of multiple choice questions embedded within the narrative. To proceed through the narrative, students must answer those questions correctly.

• The student will be able to demonstrate that context influences authority.
• The student will be able to identify an element of the creation process that may be an indicator of quality for school work.
• The student will be able to assert the importance of citing sources.
• The student will be able to rank a research topic based on a question as being more effective than one that provides an overview.
• The student will be able to articulate that scholarship evolves over time.
• The student will be able to identify one or more reasons why it is important to consult more than one source when conducting research. “

Take a break from your other summertime activities, and play a round or two of this game now! It’s not “just” playing games – you are doing an assessment of a potentially valuable professional resource. If it so happens you are also having fun- that’s not a problem!