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Students typically begin research with everyday conversational questions, which is a natural and intuitive way to think about information needs. However, search tools do not always interpret natural language the way people do, and this can affect our search results.
"Boolean's Pizza Palace" is a gamified assessment activity (3 minutes) where students play as pizza employees who translate customer orders into search strings.
Prerequisite reading: See the companion resource, Boolean Explained: An Illustrated Zine, to introduce these concepts before playing: https://sandbox.acrl.org/resources/boolean-explained-illustrated-zine
Learning Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
- Apply the correct Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT), truncation (*), and quotation marks ("") to a search need.
- Translate everyday conversational questions (customer orders) into advanced search strings.
Materials needed:
- Game Instructions and other resources (for students and instructors): Canva template with the student game instructions to show students and Quick Start for Instructors: https://canva.link/t28gofha9wwp6x1
- Socrative account for the instructor: https://www.socrative.com/
- Projector
- Student devices
Versión en Español: https://sandbox.acrl.org/resources/la-pizzeria-de-boolean-de-ordenes-busquedas-avanzadas