Making it Fun
"People my age see real life as a video game"
Making the tour interactive was a good start, but to be a game, it needed to be fun as well. What makes a game fun? According to game designers, a game will be successful if it is simple to use, challenges the user, teaches a pattern of behavior, provides rewards, and is shareable.
Further research into gaming and education led us to redesign the interactive tour into more of a scavenger hunt-style game, requiring students to use both physical and online resources and library technology in order to complete it successfully. Experience with creating games helped here: Lorin has created games for our university-wide freshmen orientation sessions (Bobcat Preview) to keep interest high through interaction and competition, and Tricia has created paper-based scavenger hunts for a high-school outreach program in the library requiring students to compete by interacting with different collections and technologies in the library, then sharing their results with each other.
Edventure provided most of the necessary game components, but providing for both immediate and long-term rewards required collaboration with faculty. This was made possible through having faculty recognize the need to make completing the game worth a participation grade, and through Edventure's capability to export and share the game results with faculty.