September 2, 2008

DUCK HUNT, or How I Spent My Mandatory Vacation

A lot of people out there in internetland have been googling "library orientation scavenger hunt" or similar keywords, and some folks have ended up here (you'll have to take my word on this). I wouldn't want to disappoint ye olde googlers or our regular (excessively observant) readers who are curious about what I ended up doing for the Great Indoors. UGLi Blog, as always, is here to meet your needs.

Earlier this summer, I was scratching my head trying to come up with scavenger hunt ideas, but nothing really sang to me until the deadline for the Great Indoors (i.e. the day itself) began to approach. This is typical for me, as I do my best innovating in times of great need. Somehow I decided ducks would be a good organizing theme, specifically rubber duckies. The idea began with "the UGLi duckling" and evolved from there. I go with whatever pops into my head when crunch time rolls around. Here's how it went:

The prizes for the scavenger hunt were rubber ducks with the MLibrary logo (naturally we put these in a much bigger, inflatable duck):


At the reference desk, participants were given a map of the library and Smartypants, their first duck. Each duck handout said FOUND on one side and LOST on the other. The found side gave a short bio of each duck, and the lost side told students the name and location of the next duck to retrieve.

These ducks (Smartypants, Michigander, Hypatia, Arnold, Quackers, Techie and Duckerton) were all associated with an area of the Shapiro Libraries (UGL reference desk, Askwith, Science, stacks, Bert's Cafe, computer lab and instructional center). By collecting all seven ducks and returning them to the reference desk, students earned their very own coveted squeaking rubber ducky. As you can probably imagine, the whole thing went over quite swimmingly.

11 comments:

  1. you should mail them to alumni. and by alumni I mean me. :)

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  2. when i read that you named one of the duckies hypatia i had a flashback to my digital librarianship class and almost threw up.

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  3. what does hypatia have to do with digital librarianship? do tell!

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  4. OH. this explains that friday beer promo. love it.

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  5. Turns out the Millennials love rubber duckies!

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  6. Katie, that picture of you is the most adorable thing I have seen all week. And I teach second graders.

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  7. does blogger email you when other people comment on the posts you comment on? Anyway, it's Sarah from tech house at Oberlin, originally here from Facebook. :)

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  8. Aha! I remember you "giving in" now! I just couldn't tell who you were from your blog, and I didn't do any Facebook research because I didn't make the first life connection. I don't get emails, but I do have a comments feed of the latest 5 comments on the home page, and I tend to notice things on the blog anyway... UGLi Blog is a true, calm, entertaining electronic place for us, so I spend a good amount of time here, creating and tinkering. And noticing.

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