Teen Tech Week Bingo (Library Life)

March has brought about another Teen Tech Week. This is an annual event that encourages teen library goers to use the libraries non-print resources for fun and for academics. After seeing so many QR code scavenger hunts I really thought it would be cool to do in town because we are located in such a neat little village. However March is still cold, and I’m not sure parents would appreciate sending their kids all over town. However I helped come up with something similar, an interactive game of BINGO!!

This ain’t your run of the mill bingo game. Each square features a different task that the teens had to complete. Each task is technology related and vary. Tasks were as simple as following the library’s Goodreads page, or involve them recording a video book talk on either vine or youtube. Every time a task is completed they saw a librarian that stamped their bingo card. Once they made a straight line or a diagonal, they won a prize.

We wanted to make sure the kids shared their content with us so we asked that most of the tasks be submitted to us by email or shared with us on social media. We also created a hashtag teens could tag the stuff they were doing for the contest.

Something that I didn't take into account, was that not all kids use social media. A lot of the younger teens are not allowed to go on certain sites, so weren't able to complete some of the tasks. Luckily I included a few tasks that were about technology, but did not require social media. I asked them a few tech related question that they had to answer. An example is I asked them to define an internet troll and one tasked asked them to translate binary. 

It was a fun contest and I hope we get to do it again next year.