Karen Markey is a fac­ulty mem­ber in the School of Infor­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. Ear­lier this year, she received a small grant from the Del­mas Foun­da­tion to build a pro­to­type online board game that teaches stu­dents information-literacy skills. Her game pro­to­type is now fully oper­a­tional and is being tested and eval­u­ated by a class of 75 under­grad­u­ates at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan.

They’ve just fin­ished con­duct­ing inter­views with stu­dent game play­ers, but they haven’t had suf­fi­cient time to mull over inter­view data and ana­lyze game play logs. They already rec­og­nize that the incen­tive for play­ing the game is a crit­i­cal issue and future games must be inti­mately con­nected to a class assign­ment or project.

Because Karen wants to do some­thing that would scale beyond Michi­gan, she is look­ing for research part­ners at pub­lic or aca­d­e­mic libraries who are inter­ested in build­ing on her foun­da­tion, expand­ing what they have already done, and test­ing her approach with their library patrons. Her intent is to find libraries who want to col­lab­o­rate on an IMLS National Lead­er­ship grant to host a unique instance of the game that is cus­tomized to achiev­ing their infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy objectives.

The game is based on the “search strat­egy” model that Tom Kirk and his Earl­ham Col­lege col­leagues devised to teach under­grad­u­ates how to do library research. Karen chose the “Black Death” for the pro­to­type game’s topic, and they are learn­ing from their eval­u­a­tion other top­ics that college-age stu­dents prefer.

Here are some links to learn more about their approach:

1. Infor­ma­tion on their Sto­rygame Project gen­er­ally: http://www.si.umich.edu/~ylime/storygame.html
2. Playing-the-game video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u76tW-né-yY
3. Man­ual for play­ing the game: http://ics.umflint.edu:3904/manual/manual.html

If you’re inter­ested in part­ner­ing with Karen, you can con­tact her at ylime [ at ] umich.edu. I can’t wait to hear more about this project and watch it develop.