BCIT staff develop video game to teach students about good research
Big-time shout out to the British Columbia Institute of Technology today, for an ingenious tool they’ve developed to teach students about evaluating sources for objectivity and accuracy: a video game.
After hearing from instructor after instructor about how their students were using only Wikipedia for research, staff from the library and the Learning and Teaching Centre developed a Web Evaluation Game (WEG) to teach students about researching accurately.
“It is a key part of the library's mandate to assist students with research,” says Lin. “That includes teaching them how to find and evaluate information from a wide variety of sources.”
“The WEG project was intended to provide students and instructors with a fun, interactive web-based tool to introduce five web evaluation criteria,” Lin continues. After much brainstorming, the team came up with a museum-based game. Each “room” in the museum represents a criterion for evaluating online sources and information.
Students find a code once they complete the game. The code changes so that instructors can ensure that students cannot pass the code to one another without completing the game.
Current BCIT students can send the code to the library to enter a draw for one of two $50 BCIT bookstore certificates.
Pretty smart, BCIT. I’m sure other post-secondary institutions would benefit from having a tool like this to teach students, so maybe BCIT’s hit something big on this one.
