A Game for Teaching Boolean Searching

At tonight's Brighton Library Teach Meet (#btnlibtm) one of my favourite sessions was Siobhan Duvigneau from the Institute of Development Studies demonstrating the way she teaches boolean using an experiential learning technique...or I would say, using a game.

Siobhan noted that students don't find boolean searching a very interesting topic and making it engaging and relevant can be hard. So she tries to make her demonstration very visual for her students by making it physical - "stand up if..." and then stating the search criteria.

Here's the first round: Stand up if...you are Female and a Librarian:

Then we were encouraged to suggest some NOT criteria. I offered: "stand up if...you are male or female and NOT from the University of Brighton". Actually this confused people, but they worked out whether they should or shouldn't be standing!

I spoke to Siobhan after to see how she extends this when she's got more time than the 5 minutes we had tonight. She says she sets the students targets to achieve, like: "come up with a query that leaves only one student standing". This, for me, really adds the game elements, a competition to quickly find a way of achieving the target she has set using the rules of the game. You could have a lot of fun getting the students to come up with their own increasingly complex targets and enjoying the challenge of finding the search criteria to give those results.

The beauty is the visual nature of the results. I don't believe you could model this online in anywhere near the same way - having individuals figure out of they should or shouldn't be standing and seeing the results is a very powerful demonstration.