This program was offered as part of Thinking Money, a traveling exhibit about financial literacy offered by the ALA Public Programs Office and the FINRA Foundation.
To celebrate the unveiling of the exhibit, we wanted to throw an opening night party. To complement the party, we developed a fun but educational financial literacy Jeopardy game using a free online program called Factile.
We hosted the game at 6:30 p.m. that opening night, Dec. 13, 2016, with mostly middle school-aged kids and their parents. Later, we had the opportunity to share it with two classes of high schoolers from a local vocational school who came as a field trip.
Advanced Planning
I started working for the Framingham Public Library in June 2016, and at that time my predecessor had applied for the ALA Thinking Money grant. We were selected as the only site in Massachusetts. We had to plan programs in conjunction with the exhibit, and one of the programs I wanted to do was an opening night celebration.
I was trying to think of ways to make it something special, and I thought a trivia game with financial literacy questions would be an interesting addition.
To create the game, I used a program called Factile. The program lets you create an account, and it gives you a Jeopardy-style board where you can type in your category names and questions. It was all super easy to use — just a plug-and-play type of arrangement.
I based the questions on the six major topics covered by the exhibit: wants vs. needs, earning and paying interest, preparing for a rainy/sunny day, imagining your future self, avoiding finanacial fraud and thinking money. Then I came up with fun Jeopardy-style category names like "School's Out for the Summer" and "Forever Indebted to You."
I came up with a third to half of the questions; the rest came from the reference staff so they could be involved without having to directly interact with the teens. In total, it ended up taking five or six hours to come up with the questions, plug them into the game and test it a few times to make sure everything worked.
Marketing
To advertise the exhibit grand opening, we sent press releases to some local papers, posted on local message boards, and advertised in our library newsletter, which goes out monthly. We also hung posters around the downtown area, and the local schools put it in their email blast.
I've found that local family groups are actually really good advertising, too — there's a Facebook group called the Framingham Family Network that’s great for spreading the word.
Budgeting
The game was completely free. You can subscribe to a more complicated version of Factile if you want a more intense trivia game with buzzers connected to it and some other features (which we never used), but if you want to just create a simple Jeopardy game, that’s free.
Day-of-event Activity
The day of was very simple. We had already had a mounted projector on the ceiling of the room, so I really just had to log into the game.
Because we had a big room full of people, I set up the game as one player so the entire room could work together to answer the questions. But if you were doing it as a classroom or as a smaller program at a library, you can set up trivia-style teams competing against each other.
Program Execution
On the opening night, we had around 20 people play the game. On the day the two classes came in for their field trip, we had 30 participants.
We had surveys that we were collecting as part of the exhibit, and all the ones we had collected for the game were generally positive, apart from a few teenagers who I think were dragged there by their parents.
My biggest goal was to have something fun to do before opening up the exhibit and to have the secondary benefit of school groups being able to use it, and I think the game cleared both of those things really well.
Advice
Depending on your topic, I think that working with the reference staff for questions is a good idea. It gave our reference staff something to do while waiting for someone to ask them a question, and it also provided us with questions that we otherwise wouldn't have thought of.
Give yourself some time to test the game and make sure the categories and the progression of questions work.
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