 All right, welcome to the next session in our Big Talk from Small Libraries Conference 2022. I'm Krista Porter, your host here today. And next up, we have, in search of the perfect potato chip, we're all in search of that, I think. But this may be a little different way of doing it. I don't know, we'll find out about doing a virtual escape room for first year students. And so with us today is Kali Biagi, and she is from the Don University here in Nebraska, just down the road from where I am. And she's going to tell us about how she created this great resource and experience for her first year students. So I'll hand it over to you, Kali, to tell us all about it. All right. Thank you. And as Krista mentioned, my name is Kali Biagi. I'm the online learning librarian at Don University in Crete, Nebraska. And I am going to turn off my webcam while I present just to make sure my internet stays stable. So I hope you'll be able for that. Yeah. So I will start with a little bit of information about Don University. Don was founded in 1872, making it the oldest liberal arts unit, oldest liberal arts institution in Nebraska. We became Don University in 2016. We were Don College up until that point. And this year, 2022 is our 150th anniversary. So our main campus is in Crete, Nebraska with satellite campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and online. And the Crete campus primarily serves residential undergraduate students. The library is also located on the Crete campus. Our non-traditional undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as one doctoral program that we have, primarily take place on the Lincoln, Omaha and online campuses. Our total FTE for this year is just over 1,800 students. So our enrollment is down. I think this is kind of a common thing that's happening. And we have three faculty librarians and two library staff in the library. We just have a, we just welcomed a new library director in November. He joined us from Maine. So that has been exciting. I just want to, you know, your camera did pop back up. I didn't know you clicked on it again up to you if you want to. I think, I think it's safer this way. So that's not a problem. No, you said you wanted to, and it went off, but then it came back on. So I just wanted to make sure. No worries. Things going. Yeah. Okay, so I will give a little bit of an overview of what an escape room is. I know some of us are probably familiar with them, but I just want to give that background. So an escape room is a game in which participants work together to solve clues and solve puzzles to achieve a goal. So in the most classic, like literal version, that goal is to physically escape a room. Escape rooms are a popular form of entertainment around the world. And educators and librarians have adapted this trend to create educational or just fun library programming in academic libraries escape room clues are often based on information literacy concepts. So there's no shortage of blogs and articles about escape rooms and libraries. These can be found in places like the school library journal, ACRL, lots of places. And in 2019, the American Library Association published Alyssa Krosky's comprehensive book on the subject. So libraries have been also experimenting with virtual options for escape rooms and similar activities. Even before the pandemic, virtual options offered a way for librarians to engage with students without having to be in a room with them. Virtual options can incorporate puzzles and clues just like physical options, but they might be more cost and time effective. They can also allow students to engage with them over a longer period of time so more students can access them if they're offered asynchronously. The version that I created was a synchronous activity that took place in a classroom, but there are versions out there that students can access anytime they want and do whatever they want. And of course during a pandemic, virtual options can allow for physical distancing. So how did my escape room come about? Well, over the summer, I was contacted by a chemistry professor who was running a summer bridge program for incoming STEM students. And she wanted a general library introduction or orientation for the students. So I was kind of excited for the chance to be a little creative because I didn't have to teach to a specific research assignment like I usually have to. So I had known about libraries using escape rooms for a while and as an escape room fan myself, I thought this was a great opportunity to try it out. So I started my planning and research by reading a really great paper by Glenn Coaling and Alyssa Russo at the University of New Mexico. They built an in-person escape room focused on information literacy topics, like I mentioned, and I highly recommend their paper. It's very good. I got my idea for my first clue from them, but ultimately what they did was more in depth than I needed and had time to put together. So with that in mind, I looked at some examples of virtual escape rooms. I didn't have time or funds to assemble a physical escape room with props and puzzles and locks and all of those things. So I rediscovered a presentation from the 2019 ACRL conference, which is thankfully still available online at the time of this live presentation. The panelists discussed the various escape rooms that they had created in their libraries, and I was particularly inspired by Walsh University's Choose Your Own Adventure style virtual escape rooms, and they used Google Forms for that. However, those examples didn't require students to really solve any puzzles. It was more of like a click-through activity, and I wanted puzzles in my escape room. So with that in mind, I ultimately decided to use a digital lockbox approach where students would have to solve a clue to type the correct answer into the form before they could move on to the next section. So there are lots of tutorials for this on the internet, but I found Dr. Katlyn Tucker's blog post about it particularly helpful, and I'm going to share links to all of these resources at the end of my presentation. So once I had an idea of what I was going to do, I had to come up with my theme and the clues. So I wanted something science or chemistry related because this was for the bridge program. And so I was searching around our library catalog for a book to use for our first clue. My initial thought was to do something with forensic science or something like that, but I was having trouble finding anything fun and exciting when somehow I stumbled across this book, The Potato Chips by John Baldassari. It's an art book that we have in our collection. It contains images of celebrities' faces that are superimposed over potato chips. So that, yeah, and that's what inspired my theme, my scenario, of a chemistry professor trying to come up with a top secret formula for the perfect potato chip. It's kind of a roundabout way to get there. I don't even remember how I found it, but I was just like, Oh, I can do that. Okay. So, so once I had my theme, I came up with four tasks that felt were important for first year students to know about how to use the library. And those tasks were searching for books in the catalog, identifying and searching in a database, learning about our inner library loan service, and finding a subject guide or a lib guide. So I designed a clue for each task and I'll discuss each clue in depth next. And then the answers to the clues would be the passwords that the professor used to protect their top secret research. After testing this on the bridge program over the summer, I decided that this would be a fun activity to try in our LAR 101 courses. LAR 101 are the first year liberal arts seminars that we have here at Dome. There are usually about 15 sections of the class and librarians meet with most, if not all of them, at least once during the fall semester. Sometimes if we're lucky, we can get in there three times, but a lot of times it's just once or twice. Each section is taught by a different faculty member and has a different theme, but generally all the classes have the same learning outcomes. So when it came to actually running the activity, as I mentioned, this was a synchronous activity that took place in a classroom, but it did use Google Forms. So I set up Google Forms using response validation. So the scenario that I introduced was that the professor had forgotten their passwords and students had to help them figure out the passwords so that they could access their top secret research. Students had to solve a clue and enter the correct password in the form before they could move on to the next section. So to make a digital lockbox activity work, you have to use response validation in Google Forms. And again, Dr. Tucker's tutorial that I mentioned before was really helpful as I was setting this up. So I started each session with a five minute tour of the library website. I showed students generally what they would need to do to complete each task. So that was how to search in the library catalog, how to find a database, but not how to search in the database, how to learn about general library services, including in our library loan, and where to find our live guides. I tried to strongly emphasize students paying close attention so that they could complete the next activity. So students completed the activity with a partner. Sometimes there would be a group of three if the class had an odd number of students. But this helped to keep it a little bit more active. And I either showed the link on a slide or I embedded it in a course research guide. So having the link in a research guide was easier because I found that students could have trouble typing the bit.ly links incorrectly. So I transitioned partway through the semester to just putting it in a research guide. So the activity took about 25 to 30 minutes complete in general. And that left just enough time in a 50 minute session to debrief. And so because each LAR 101 has a unique theme, I really ambitiously thought that I was going to design a different version for every session that I did over the fall semester, but I quickly realized that that was completely unrealistic. So I kept it to two versions. So there was the science potato chips version and then a humanities version that I based on Wonder Woman. I chose Wonder Woman because one of the LAR 101 sections had a theme of heroes and that professor has a known fondness for comic books. So I thought it would be an appropriate choice. So I used one of these two versions for all eight of the LAR 101 sections that I worked with in the fall. And one of my colleagues also adapted a version for a section that focused on serial killers. So that was interesting. All of the versions had the same basic clue structure, and I'm going to show examples from my potato chips version in this presentation. So let's talk about the clues themselves. I'm going to pause for a few seconds here and let you read the clue, and then I will talk about how the students solved it. So the clue to solve the first password is what's called a pigpen cipher. So as I mentioned, I got this idea from Colling and Russo's paper. So I chose a book from our library catalog and I used a website to encode the author's name. And I'll share a link to the website that I used at the end of the presentation. So I printed out pages with the clue and the key so that students could solve the clue. They then had to type the author's name into the catalog to find the correct book title. So the password then was the title of the book. So in this version, the potato chips version, the book was Miracle Chips by John Baldessari. This clue is the most escape room like clue. The other clues don't require as much or any decoding. They're more about locating information around the library website or in a database. So I'll talk about challenges with this password. This clue was generally pretty easy for students if they had paid attention to my website and catalog demo. Sometimes they wouldn't use the books tab on our catalog, which eliminates other types of results from their search. So this meant that they would have to scroll further through the results that included things like articles and video before they found the book. Instead of having the book just appear right at the top of their results. But generally this one was pretty easy and I didn't have to give too many hints. So I will pause again to give you time to read the second clue. So the second clue required students to find a database in our A to Z list and then run a search in that database. The password then would be the number of results that they got if they ran the search correctly in the correct database. So this meant that they had to type the exact search into the search box and use the full text and peer reviewed limiters. I did not demonstrate database searching in my library website tour. So students had to use all the information from each clue or from the clue to make sure that they were doing the correct search. They usually figured it out but I did have to give a good number of hints for this one. I also try to include a hint in the clue itself by emphasizing the professor's subject area in asterisks. This would tell the students which subject they should narrow the database list down to. In the potato chips example here it was chemistry. I also included the exact description of the database from our A to Z list in the clue itself. So students should be able to find the right database if they compared the descriptions. So this clue was probably the hardest clue for students to figure out. First they might choose the wrong database. So the number of results that they got would be incorrect from the start. So if I saw them kind of like not going in the right direction I'd have to help them identify the correct database from the list. I also made this clue intentionally a little bit tricky. Students had to include the quotation marks around the words potato chips in the search. So usually my hint for this would be like very emphatic I'd say you have to include everything the professor typed in their search every character. And sometimes they'd get it but sometimes they wouldn't. So I would just tell them to add the quotation marks and explain that I would explain why later. So then in the debrief I would use this clue to discuss the importance of using quotation marks around certain search terms to get accurate results. Databases are updated often as we know so I had to remember to check the number of results in the database before each session so that I could update the correct answer. Otherwise students would get frustrated. So thankfully the number never changed in the middle of a session. But I suppose that would have been possible and if that did happen I would have used it as a teaching moment to show that we have access to really great and up to date information. So awesome. But probably the most frustrating challenge with this password is that Google Forms is case and punctuation sensitive. So if students would put a comma in their answer if it was in the thousands. The answer wouldn't go through even if it was the correct number and that's because of that punctuation sensitivity. So I tried to explain that to them, but I would usually just tell them oh that's the right answer just delete the comma and you can move forward. I'm not really sure how to fix that problem. So more things to think about but it's definitely worth mentioning. All right, let me pause again to let you read the third clue. So this clue was intended to introduce students to our inner library loan service. It really just required them to read the clue carefully and to have been paying attention to my website tour. And then the password was literally just inner library loan. So again, this was generally a pretty easy clue. If they hadn't paid attention to the website tour they might struggle. And they might also have gotten distracted by that article citation that I included and try searching for the article itself. So I would have to kind of steer them back to the library website and tell them to simplify it a little bit. The biggest issue here again was case sensitivity. So if they capitalized the L in inter library, the form would register their answer as incorrect and not let them advance, which definitely caused some frustration for the students and for me. So the fourth and final clue I will pause one more time and let you read this. So this last clue required students to identify a research guide and find a piece of information within that guide. So like the database clue I gave a hint to which guide the password would be in by emphasizing the subject of the professor. So again here you can see it was a chemistry professor. So I hid the clue on our chemistry research starter. I then had to use the information in the clue to find the correct page of the guide. And then from there I tried to make the location of the password very obvious. So you can see in the image. It's just a little box underneath the navigation of the guide and it says top secret password in all caps. So to add another escape room puzzle element. I coded the final password in pig Latin. I thought it was kind of clever but it turned out to be another frustrating stumbling block for students. So challenges with this password students might choose the wrong research guide. So I'd have to steer them in the right direction again. I also found that students would overthink the clue they wouldn't look around the whole page, or they just wouldn't see the password. They just wouldn't see that box that I put in there. So probably the most frequent hint that I gave was like waving my hand around the screen to where the password box was and then they'd see it, and then they'd feel silly. And then I tell them oh you're not silly just pay close attention. So this is a little bit of a tangential note. I thought that this was really interesting from a website usability standpoint. It made me realize that students may not see information, even in a place that I think is really obvious and highly visible, but that's kind of getting off topic. So in the potato chips version. And not all of the students were familiar with Pig Latin. So I had to add instructions into the clue, which helped a little bit, but it still seemed to be kind of frustrating for students. So in the Wonder Woman version. I actually changed it the point of the activity wasn't to learn how to use Pig Latin it was to learn how to find information on the library website. So I made the password easier to find. They just had to find the right page of the guide and then copy and paste that into the form. So in the version with Wonder Woman, the password was her catchphrase great Hera. All right, as I've alluded to students were allowed to ask for hints. So I would spend a lot of the time during the session just kind of like walking around the classroom. Seeing where students needed help and interacting that way. I also encouraged groups to help each other out if they finished early. And then after every group had finished the activity, I recapped what they learned from solving each clue. So, again, this was how to use the library catalog, how to learn about interlibrary loan services, identifying a research guide and searching in a database. So then after that search, after that short recap, I use that database searching clue with the quotation marks as a jumping off point to discuss Boolean operators and searching in databases. And then this would typically finish out the 50 minute class session. So, overall successes. I am a big believer in active learning. It helps students retain information better. And frankly, it's more fun for me and more fun for the students than if I just stand in front of the classroom and lecture. After I tried this for the first time with the summer bridge program, I overheard a student saying to their classmates, that was fun, as they left the classroom and that just made my heart swell. And that was the moment that I knew I wanted to use this in the LAR 101 sessions. At the end of those sessions, I would ask the students if they found the activity fun or frustrating, just as kind of like an informal evaluation to see if I needed to tweak anything. And most of the time the answer was either fun or frustrating, but also fun. So, I got great feedback from professors. At least one professor commented that they noticed that their students were staying more visibly engaged during the typically more boring database explanation part of the presentation. So I thought that that was really a huge success. So overall challenges with this activity. As I've mentioned a couple of times, students found the case sensitivity in Google forms very frustrating. This is good to illustrate the use of quotation marks when you're searching in a database, but it's bad if students put a comma in an otherwise correct answer. Students also have to read carefully and pay attention and read each clue closely. Close reading and pay attention are skills that they need anyway, but they aren't always prepared to do that in what seems like kind of a fun and goofy activity. Especially during those 8am class sessions when no one's really awake anyway. So, to that end, rewards. This was kind of a total like duh moment. But the first time I did this activity with an LAR 101 class, a student said, so do we get candy when we finish or what? And of course they should have gotten candy. Why didn't I think of that? So from that on out, potato chips. But you know, you're right. Small bag of potatoes. Next time I do this, I'm going to do potato chips for sure. Things you don't think about. Totally obvious. Yes, but so I did bring candy and library swag to future sessions. So I wanted to make sure I showed you the resources that I used when I designed this activity. And these are going to be available after the conference with my slides. So overall, I think this was a really fun way to introduce students to important library services. It didn't get really in depth with information literacy, but I think it's what first year students needed maybe for the first time that they were coming to the library. They were very adaptable and students really seem to enjoy it. And I hope that you're inspired to try something similar. So with that, I think there should be plenty of time for questions. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and turn my camera. Put your screen back up there for now. Yeah. Yes. Put your screen back out just in case anyone wants to refer back to anything and grab your email and everything there. Going back to your, actually can you just pop back to those resources? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just to that screen. Yep. As Kelly said, yeah, this, the slides will be available with the recording as we do for all of our sessions. And as you see, there's links built right into there, which is great, I think for people to be able to go and you know, to duplicate this in their own libraries, whether it's academic or public. Absolutely. So yeah, if anybody has any questions, get them typed into the questions section. We as Kelly said, we have plenty of time for questions here. So you want to ask anything about what you did want to look at something more closely, we can also dig into any of these resources as well. If you want to see what is actually on the pages there that she links to. So we do have some questions here. You referenced this, you did this as a session that you did in person actually. So it's not just a virtual escape room. It's, you're in person teaching the person they're doing it online, I guess, as to traditional escape room as you described which is physical stuff in a room that you're trying to escape from. Yeah, as the name says, what what about doing this actually virtual when you're not in a room with them is that something that you think this. Did you do that or was all of yours all in person and how would you translate this maybe into something where it's completely no interaction with. Yeah, that's a really good question. So that's true. My title might have been a little misleading. It was digital, but I did teach it in person so to make this fully virtual. I think what I would need to do is kind of record that library website tour, maybe to give people a little bit of that orientation. So the first clue that was that pigpen cipher, I printed that out and handed that to students so I would have to put that online for people to be able to solve. But otherwise I think it, the rest of the clues should be pretty adaptable to a fully virtual environment. Yeah, absolutely. Someone did ask about using they were thinking of virtual as using like a augmented reality or using glass, you know the virtual reality glasses or things and like, no, no. I did think pretty hard about trying to design something with augmented reality this summer but it just didn't happen so. And the library to show actually showing them you know taking them into, you know, take your phone out into the library and use it. That's a whole that's a whole nother level of. Yeah, it's really cool. I'd like to try it but. Maybe my next year you'll do a presentation on that for us. So let's see what other questions do we have here. Oh, yeah, actually good one. Um, can the questions be shuffled so that not all the students are on the same one. So maybe having it so they're not all like together helping each other do the same one and can they do whatever and whatever order. That's a good question. I think you do have that option in Google forms I'm not sure, but other survey type tools like maybe Qualtrics or something could basically do the same thing and I think those do allow for question randomization. Oh random so they don't even know so each class would come up with some different. So it's just like order, like the order of the questions random. Yeah, right, right. Okay so so for the issues with the Google forms that they have. Yeah, people wondering how would we what to do is is there are other other options besides Google forms to use is the question. I know I know you're not the first person I've heard of that's done this or I've seen presentations by that have used them because they're there I mean. They're out there it's free. It's pretty simple and easy to use. But I haven't heard of anybody use. What else would someone use. So, to do like a form type situation like what I presented Qualtrics is another survey kind of platform. Which our school does don't does have an institutional subscription to that, but not everyone does. So that means something you'd have to, yeah, sign up. Other options. I'm not really sure like other kind of form type options. I've actually seen and these are getting really in depth and not like not form based but I've seen people create like kind of clickable. Like vignettes I guess where they like make a virtual version of their library or like a room that people can click on and find stuff. Right, right. So that's kind of interesting. I was kind of going for a low tech simple option. And sometimes you know it depends it's going to depend on. I guess the technical ability you think that your students might have to be able to do those kind of things with their devices or depending on their internet connection, or whatever they're doing if something like that would, you know, would work for them. Absolutely. All right. Oh, okay. So let's see what this. Hmm. A possible suggestion they don't know it says that office 365 has a forms option to. Okay. Wonder if that would be something and I know Microsoft's doing some of their things more free versions public versions of their software. I think it's, it's, it's one of the things like and we were we create forms here in house at the library at our library commission for gathering information we're signing up for signing for conferences events like this. And that's like behind the scenes coding thing is that yes we will accept a letter, you know, a number with or without a height of either way works. And unfortunately that's something we don't have the control over in Google they just think of it as one way and be a little more open minded. I'm just kidding about that what it is. So that could be something to use absolutely. So another question is, so you've used this you said in two different classes so far. And you said science and humanities correct. So the question, are you planning on expanding it into anything else. Any other other disciplines. So, um, so the themes, they weren't really like true, like using science or humanities concept they were just kind of more themed, I guess. I have a great reason for why I did that but these are definitely very adaptable. As I mentioned, I kind of thought that I would make a different version for every LAR 101 that I did. So we have LAR courses that focus on like technology and heroes as I mentioned. There's one that is about like the power of stories. So I thought that I would make a different version for every class, but I'm just one human being and didn't have time to do that. So I actually used either one of these two options for all eight of the classes that I worked with. Well, that's, I mean, you're, you're speaking, you know, to the choir here single librarians or small staff and our small and rural libraries. We work, we are what we are and we got as much time as we've got. I think, I mean, there's definitely opportunities for like more high concept type information to be included. I really just wanted this particular version to be a true like library orientation. Don't have to think too much about high concepts just getting a sense of what's available. Makes sense. Great. I think we are good to wrap it up for your sessions. Anybody have any or less minute despot questions you want to ask of Kelly. You can pop to that next slide. Your email address on there. If you do want to reach out to her, ask her from some more about how she did this, the tips and tricks for doing it in your library. And what's great about this is also this is not specific to just academic libraries. This is something all public libraries or school libraries everyone could be using this. For sure. Good. Yeah, make it fun. Even though some of those professors think it could be boring. You don't want to hear that one of fun, even if you're trying to learn something. Absolutely. All right, so thank you to you. Yes, I am.