Tonight I watched the Lilly Conference recorded session entitled “Adaptable Bingo Game for Students Learning to Use Research Databases.” Megan Cherry is a historian of 17th and 18th century North America at North Carolina State University. The activity Cherry designed was for an upper-division undergraduate and graduate seminar. The student learning outcomes were for students to acquire basic research skills. Cherry described the background, design, and potential adaptations of this activity. In the fall of 2020, Cherry came up with this activity when confronted with emergy remote teaching. Monday classes discussed work, and Wednesday sessions were devoted to searching for and verifying the sources of information. The Hands-on History projects are worth 10% of the final grade. The Bingo activity came after students had read early modern print and read 18th-century primary sources. The activity is highly adaptable. They used a Readex American’s Historical Newspapers database. Students watched a video to learn some of the basics of the functionality. All students had the same Bingo card but each student had a different newspaper article. All students read that issue and searched for examples. The chat was very active, according to Cherry, and they were “sucked into the primary source.” The bingo squares were designed by Cherry to have common 18th-century activities. A student survey and course evaluations shared positive feedback about the activity. A variation that Cherry described was using different texts and randomizing the squares on the bingo cards. Another variation was the use of a journal article and then squares for hypothesis development and result description, for example. Another variation is to do a scavenger hunt and documentation of results. Cherry described several variations that could be adapted for the courses I teach.
