Database Scavenger Hunt

[#1]

Assignment by Hayden Kindrat, Bedford New Scholar 2024

This activity is designed to acquaint WRT 102 students with the databases accessible to them through Stony Brook University’s libraries. It takes place in the classroom. I usually set aside forty-five minutes to an hour for this activity.

Students are asked to bring their laptops to class and to break into groups of four. I give the entire class a search task to complete, which involves the use of advanced search options, database directories and research guides, Boolean operators (AND, OR), and phrase searching with quotation marks, which they’ve become glancingly familiar with prior to this activity. The first team to complete the task gets a point (candy, extra credit, etc.), but they have to demonstrate for the class how they arrived at their search result on the classroom’s smartboard.

Some of these tasks involve whittling down massive search results by whatever means they can think of, from hundreds of thousands of results, to hundreds, to a single search result. For example: “Make a search query involving ‘Shakespeare’ that yields a single search result.”

Others involve using date ranges, such as “Find me the earliest mention of Stony Brook’s mascot, Wolfie, in a newspaper,” or, “Find a contemporaneous review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” or, “Tell me something about the Long Island Railroad in 1976.” Others still are a bit more open-ended, such as “Find me a weird New York State animal fact.”

I’ve done a variation of this activity later in the semester, after students have chosen their research topics and we have discussed “scholarly” and “popular” sources and Joseph Bizup’s BEAM method. Students work individually or in groups to find articles and also to evaluate the articles in real time. Naturally, this version of the activity moves slower.