As part of our Ready for Success project, we had Brentwood High School classes visit the SBU Libraries over our Winter Session for some on-site activities. Not every class was the same, though. Some had specific research projects to tackle while others were more open-ended and focused on exposing the students to research in general. An added bonus was giving them a chance to observe and experience a college campus first hand.
The open-ended classes tended to be more fun but presented an interesting challenge in the planning stage. How do you engage students for an hour and a half outside of their regular classrooms? One example was Kristi Muller’s English class. For these students, we incorporated a series of activities built around a breakout box game. We have a set of locks and boxes and various do-dads from Breakout.edu that we’ve used in various settings at SBU Libraries.
With the Brentwood class, we broke them up into groups of four, each team given a research scenario to work through. Some were given a campus map and challenged to map out a virtual itinerary featuring people and academic departments. Some had to decipher clues left in a study room in order to track down academic research in a specific subject area. And some had to assemble puzzles made out of the movable tables in our main event space.
In the end, this was a fun and engaging activity that got the students up and moving. They were able to apply research and critical thinking skills in a practical yet low-stakes setting. The feedbback we received was overwhelming positive and by planning this class, we actually picked up some ideas that we can use with our undergraduate population.