“You never get a second chance to make a first impression. ”
I believe that library orientations are a crucial opportunity to welcome students into our spaces, introduce them to our staff in an authentic and personal way, and increase the likelihood that they will reach out to us for guidance when they need help later on. To achieve this, my philosophy has always centered around creating fun, exciting, high-energy orientation sessions that break down typical library stereotypes and expectations.
Below, you’ll find examples of the library orientations for new students that I have designed and hosted.
For our Fall 2018 new student orientations, the Kreitzberg Library, Archives & Special Collections, and the Sullivan Museum (all housed in the same building and under one Executive Director) needed to share a 50-minute orientation session slot. We needed to host about 25 different sessions for approximately 600 students. We were told to expect anywhere from between 15-50 students in each session, so scalability was an essential component of my design idea.
As Head of Instructional Services, I was responsible for designing and leading our combined orientation sessions. I approached this challenge like a puzzle - each component (timing, content, delivery, scalability, student engagement, and “fun factor”) needed to slide into place to ensure that we had a successful concept and plan to execute.
Since puzzles were on my mind, I thought of trying to create a modified escape room challenge for our orientation sessions. After doing some background research on my idea, I discovered Breakout EDU - a company that sells kits consisting of boxes, locks, and some cool tools (UV flashlights, invisible ink pens, and red lens readers). Using the kits, educators can create customized puzzles that help to reinforce essential concepts and skills. Students must solve each puzzle to unlock each lock on the box and win the game. This method creates a kind of reverse escape room - students are breaking into a box rather than breaking out of a room. Here’s a video that does a great job showing how these kits and games work.
After pitching this idea to my colleagues, we purchased a total of 8 kits for our orientation sessions. Once the kits arrived, I worked with both the Archives and Museum staff to create several custom puzzles that would ensure that students got hands-on experience using each of the departments’ websites to find specific information (a skill we all agreed was crucial for our new students). Our three departments created a total of five unique puzzles that would all need to solved in order for each student group to unlock the large Breakout EDU box that contained a congratulatory message and candy for the team to enjoy.
All of our staff felt that the Breakout EDU game was extremely successful and kept our students engaged and entertained while they were learning and becoming familiar with searching each department’s collections and website. I plan on utilizing the Breakout EDU kits to enhance other library instruction modules, such as our MLA (or APA, Chicago Manual of Style, or AMA) Citation Workshops. Feel free to look at all of our puzzles, setup photos, and envelope designs on our Rook Week Breakout EDU Orientation Game page on Google Docs.
In the summer of 2019, I wrote a peer-reviewed journal article in Reference Services Review about the development and implementation of the Breakout EDU orientation sessions. The article has been accepted and is published online (ahead of its print publication) on the Emerald Insight platform. You can read the article here.
For our Fall 2019 new student orientations, we utilized the same format and game as the previous year but with a few tweaks to enhance the session. One change that we made was to collect usable assessment data from the students in the form of short surveys. We collected a total of 521 surveys from students, and I entered each of the responses into spreadsheets so that I could break down the data into more disparate components and observe trends. You can see the survey and the results of the data we collected outlined below. For your reference, “Rooks” are our first-year Corps of Cadets students. They go through a week of military and academic training during “Rook Week,” and the Library, Archives, and Museum orientation is a part of their week-long training.
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In addition to hosting the Breakout EDU new student orientation sessions, the library was also asked to host a few orientation sessions for our new student athletes. We had never been asked to do orientations for these students before, so I was determined to make a great first impression! I knew that we wouldn’t be able to use the Breakout EDU kits because the orientation session for the athletes was scheduled to take place in a much smaller classroom space where there wouldn’t be enough room for us to rearrange the tables needed for the activity. This time, we only had 30 minutes to create a fun, engaging orientation session that created a long-lasting impression on 50 of our newest students.
I wanted to continue our focus on gamification and came up with a modified “pub trivia” style game for our football players. First, I created a short presentation that outlined some of the library’s collection and service highlights. At the beginning of our session, I let the students know that they would be divided into teams and that each team would need to answer a series of questions about the presentation after our review. The teams would write their answers on provided slips of paper and bring them to me for scoring. My goal was that students would pay closer attention to the less-active presentation portion of the session.
It worked! When we asked each question, we gathered the teams’ answers and recorded the points on the dry erase board. We ended up with a tie between several teams and had to go into a sudden-death showdown - I’ve never seen football players move so quickly! The winning team earned their choice of library-branded prizes (pens, highlighters, and carabiner keyrings) and all of the students got candy for their participation.
We took a tired and PowerPoint-weary group of 50 new football players and got them moving, energized, and competitive while helping them to learn about essential library services and resources, and I definitely plan to add our “pub trivia” orientation into our regular instruction rotation.