Search Challenge 005: The LEGO Challenge

I just updated the LEGO Challenge.  This one is challenging partly because it involves finding information that was originally posted almost a decade ago.

It's not a very difficult task; I'd rate it a beginning or novice task.

The issue is using good enough keywords to find information that's no longer fresh. This challenge reinforces the idea that a few carefully chosen keywords is all you need. Three keywords works well. At least one of them needs to be a very specific term like a Proper Noun. That really limits the results. 

Using the date, which is usually a good keyword to include, complicates matters because it assumes the winners were announced in 2003 which was not the case.  When starting, it is better to use less rather than more to see what the search engine retrieves.

There are three possible answers for the challenge. Any one of them is good enough to solve it.

Try the Challenge

Search Challenge 002

A very popular search challenge is the Kermit Challenge.

I'd rate this a novice challenge and a good one to introduce elementary level students to search strategy, search engines, keywords, snippets and urls.

When it was first created, we posted a time to beat of 10 minutes. The only thing that would ever take this long is an inability to describe in words what is in the picture. If someone failed to use the character's name, that could slow down the search.

 Today I lowered the time to beat to 5 minutes. It takes less than a minute if you know what you are looking for.

Search Strategy 
Start by asking, "what am I looking for?" The directions call for finding a URL of a matching picture of Kermit, a URL where Kermit can be heard talking. If students don't know what a URL is, this is a good opportunity to point to one. No need to define it, just call it the address where a page on the Internet lives. Show a URL.

Keywords 
Also part of the search strategy is, "what words do I already know that I could use to find the matching picture?" The most important is given in the directions: Kermit. This is a proper noun and as such, has a very specific meaning. We want to use words that have specific meanings--if we can--when looking for information on the Internet. Other words need to come from the picture. "What do you see in the picture?" Describe it. "What is Kermit wearing?" "At what kind of an event would you wear clothes like that?"

Search Engines 
Search engines use Keywords to find matching information. The engine used here is Yahoo. Students should know that there is more than one search engine (Google). You can put any combination of words in a search engine, but it's best to use just a few. The order of the words doesn't really matter. Like most searches today, this one does not require any Boolean operators, but I'd leave that topic for older grades.

Snippets 
Search engines return matches to your keywords on a page as snippets, shortened sections of text that include the URL of the page where matching words were found, maybe the date the page was last updated, some text from the page so you can see how the words are used, a link to the page and some other information that can be topics for older grades (cached, similar). Snippets are REALLY important in finding information that matches the keywords. The search engine just finds the words, you have to determine if the way the words are used makes sense. The top result may not be the best one. Snippets may also (often) contain better words than the ones you started with. Maybe the words commencement or graduation show up. That's where people wear caps and gowns. Those words could be put in a new query such as KERMIT GRADUATION.

URL 
A little more about URLS could be introduced, such as the parts of a URL and what they tell us. In this case, the answer has the name of the organization that owns the information and the names of several folders where that information is stored: first, a news folder. Inside the news folder is another folder called 'commence' and in that folder is another one labeled '1996.' Finally in that folder is the page that matches the challenge. This page is an .htm page which stands for the kind of file it is, a pretty common information file on the Internet.

Planting the seeds that information can be organized (structured) in folders is a good computational mindset to introduce. A discussion about how to organize information (one big pile, separate piles without names, all laid out in a row, etc.) might help students think about the fastest ways to find something and what works best on computers.

 Try the Challenge. Don't miss the opportunity for learning. What other lessons can you squeeze out of this experience?

2018 Update: The Kermit Challenge became quite a bit more difficult with Long Island University absorbed Southampton College and took down the latter's Website. The answer page has been updated accordingly.

Leap Years, Leap Seconds

Leap years are curious occasions. They occur every four years. Well, almost.

There are some four year stretches when a leap year is not observed. A century is not a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. That's why the year 2000 was a leap year and why 2100 is not.

This little factoid got me reading further and that's when I found the "leap second:" an adjustment to time made to coordinate atomic time with the earth's rotation. Atomic time is based on periods/oscillations of the Cesium-133 atom at the ground state (if you want to know more about that, it's easy to look up). The earth is very gradually slowing down (to find out why, that can also be looked up). To keep the clock and the earth in sync, there's the leap second.

Let's say you what to capitalize on a topic of current interest and reinforce information fluency with students. You could have them search for NEXT LEAP SECOND. These happen more often than leap years. And there's another one coming up later this year.

But if you look at the returns from this search in Google, you may see two conflicting reports:

About Leap Seconds

www.timeanddate.com › Time Zones

Next leap second on 2012-06-30 23:59:60 UTC. The last leap second was inserted like this, in the UTC time scale, and corresponding times elsewhere in the ...

When will the next leap second occur? - Yahoo! Answers

answers.yahoo.com › ... › Science & Mathematics › Astronomy & Space

3 answers - Feb 2, 2010

Top answer: None are currently in the works. Since leap seconds depend on factors that can only be observed, not predicted, leap seconds themselves cannot be ...

Obviously, these answers don't agree. If searchers don't pay attention to the date information, they could be misled.  It's a good opportunity to point out the importance of paying attention to the published date of information.

Updated Date/Freshness Challenge

Thanks to teachers and librarians who use the resources on our site, we are able to stay up to date.  Many times the examples on 21cif are subject to Internet 'creep': a change is made to an external page over which we have no control.  With hundreds of challenges on the site, we don't routinely check up on the activities for alterations.

Here's a challenge I just updated. Ironically, it was the Date.swf Challenge and it contained three tasks that seemed 'stale': information on the web site no longer matched the challenge.

I adjusted one answer, substituted another page for a problem site and decided to leave the third example alone. Information taken from the context of the page is more accurate than the timestamp returned when the page opens in a browser window.

Java may be used to publish a timestamp of the exact moment a page is opened. Many times this is what you see if you check Page Information data. How did I manage to open a page exactly at the time it was last modified? Well, it's unlikely you did. The 'last update' is misleading and it's nothing more than the last time the page was opened by you.

In that case, other clues should be consulted for freshness. The example page in question hasn't changed in more than five years, yet its last modified is 'now'. If I was citing the page, I'd stick with the internal clues that make more sense.

Try the new challenge!

The Slow Death of the Link: Operator?

For a number of years, one of the best investigative tools for checking to see what websites link to another website has been the link: operator. Over the past couple of years, the effectiveness of the link: operator has diminished.  I hope it's not on its way out as a free tool.

Here's how it works: Let's say you want to see all (actually a sample) of the webpages that link to a site you want to investigate. Martinlutherking.org is a common example for this purpose. The query is

link:martinlutherking.org

...and the results would reveal the urls of pages that link to the martinlutherking.org home page. This list would contain links from the martinlutherking.org site itself (most sites link to their home page), educational institutions warning about bias on the site (a red flag) and hate groups (another red flag).

Google was the go-to search engine for this until a couple years ago, when they really pared back the number of results they returned. At that time, I advised using Yahoo.com as the search engine. Yahoo's Site Explorer would return many more results than Google.

Within the past few months that has changed. Yahoo merged their Site Explorer with Bing. Now that search capacity is part of the Bing Webmaster set of tools. If I want to see who links to my site 21cif.com, I have to create a Webmaster account, download an xml file from Bing (BingSiteAuth.xml) which the search engine uses to collect data on my traffic, etc. That's 1) not as user friendly as it used to be, and 2) if a site doesn't include the xml file, I doubt any information could be retrieved.

So here's what happens today if I search for link:21cif.com:

Google: 48 results, many of which are from other 21cif.com pages
Yahoo: 1 result

From using other webmaster sites like majesticseo.com, where I had to create yet another account, I know there are 394 referring domains, 193 of which are educational and 16 are governmental. Too bad I can't see what they are without a paid subscription. This seriously impares one's ability to check the 'references' of a site by looking to see who voluntarily links to it.

Checking inbound links is not only of interest to a webmaster, it helps searchers be more critical consumers of information.

For investigative purposes, having a readily available link: operator has become a staple. Now the challenge is: what is out there that can replace it?  For the time being, I'm recommended going back to Google.

Search Practice

Since last April, Google has published a daily search challenge called 'agoogleaday'.

These little challenges have only one correct answer but many ways to arrive at the answer. Since these are similar to the Search Challenges found in my blog, I thought I'd take a closer look.

Agoogleaday was created by Dan Russell as a daily trivia game to encourage creativity and search practice. Unlike the Internet Search Challenges found here, there is no timer or focus on a specific search technique or strategy and the search engine returns results only prior to April 2011. More on that shortly.

A nice feature of the puzzles is the hints that show effective keywords. This kind of scaffolding could be helpful to students. I found that I was able to solve some without searching at all, since I knew the answer to begin with. But the notion of practicing search skills has value.

Why return results that are no newer than April 2011?  According to the author, this is to prevent people from spoiling the puzzles for others by posting the answers online. This doesn't prevent people from posting the answers, it only prevents the Deja Google search engine from retrieving them. At one time I was concerned about this with my Search Challenges as well, but it hasn't proved to be a problem. In fact, people have posted the challenge questions online hoping someone will provide an answer. Most of the answers I've seen are incorrect, which ironically makes the challenges ever better and drives home the point that you need to evaluate the information you find online.

One aspect of agoogleaday for me has a less-than-positive connotation for learning and that is 'every search has one right answer.' While it may be appropriate for trivia puzzles, it is not how information usually works. There is seldom one right answer for significant questions. If the questions educators are asking students have only one right answer, we're not requiring enough thought from students. Or as David Thornburg has quipped, don't ask students questions that can be answered by searching Google (or posted by spoilers). You can still use a search engine. You just have to use your head to figure out a good answer.

That makes it more challenging both for the teacher and the student. And that's a good thing.

If it's not a hoax, what is it?

Dennis O'Connor and I are running a "Model Lesson" workshop tomorrow at the Midwest Educational Technology Conference in St. Charles, MO.

As part of the session, we're offering up four different challenges that demonstrate search and evaluation techniques. For this, we're using a spin-off of the RYT Hospital site: genochoice.com.

While students may not be able easily to detect the fictive nature of the site, the site is loaded with Red Flags.

What is not easily understood by seasoned investigators--and I expect most of the participants in tomorrow's session--is whether the site is a hoax or not. There is sufficient evidence to suggest it is not a hoax, contrary to numerous .edu sites that include genochoice on their hoax lists. The hoax theory starts to unravel the more you tug at it.

But if it isn't a hoax, what is it?

That's the challenge.

And it's a pretty good (i.e., deep) one. I'd like to hear readers' opinions on it. Why does this site exist?

By the way, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is another site that is likely in this shadowy category. Sure, it's bogus. But what is the purpose of the site?  Why would someone go to the trouble of keeping it fresh and perpetuating the fiction of a tree octopus? If you've never asked your students to figure that out, they've missed a real investigative challenge.