Keyword Games

In the newest Full Circle Resource Kit (Fall 2018), the featured article is about using games to change search behaviors. Telling students not to use full sentences and pay attention to their keywords, while instructive, is not very effective.

Student success in searching isn't quite as bad as the illustration shown, but all it takes is a couple of queries to hit to target to satisfy a poor searcher.

We invented a simple search game that serves as a game-making structure to reinforce good search techniques. A Keyword Game is basically a riddle: Who Am I? Three clues are provided: Latina, Bronx, Tarzan. Most people can't guess the identity without using a search engine.

The combination of the terms is what makes them effective, plus they are very specific terms--two are proper nouns.

For more on the games, see the latest edition of the Full Circle Kits (accessible with a school subscription).

The real value in the games is for students to create their own keyword challenges. Using one of the prompts, "Who/What/Where/When am I?" the challenge is to find 3-5 keywords that can be entered into a search engine to reveal the answer. To do so successfully, students engage in these effective search techniques:

• Search with a few words (between two and five keywords)
• Include only effective keywords and unique combinations
• Avoid verbs, pronoun, articles, conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives (including complete sentences)

Have them play each others games to see whether they can be solved. If a set of clues doesn't work, this opens up an opportunity to understand what's wrong with the query.

By the way, the answer to the riddle above is Sonia Sotomayor. In Google there are other search results at the top of the list, but these don't answer the question because they don't contain all the keywords. This emphasizes critical reading to make sure the results match expectations.