Shoes Help Teach Researching
The purpose of this activity is to help students understand how keywords work and allow them to practice developing search strings in a familiar environment. To begin, I give the students the definition of a keyword (anything you put into a search box). I affirm their existing abilities by listing examples of how they might already be using keyword skills, such as trying to locate a restaurant that delivers gluten-free pizza after midnight, before telling them that we’ll use those same abilities first in an activity, and then in an academic context to support the paper they are writing.
Each student needs their own internet-enabled searchable device. Computers, tablets, and smartphones all work well. I instruct the students to navigate to the Amazon home page (amazon.com) and tell them I will project an image of an item for sale on Amazon and their goal is to locate that item by using keywords in the search bar. Note: it’s important that the students not have access to the image virtually, or they will use a reverse image search and circumvent the lesson. That is its own skill, but not the one I’m trying to teach! I typically project the image, but giving the class print-outs would also work.
I typically use shoes as my items for this exercise because of the wide variety available and the many words one can use to describe them (is it a sneaker, a heel, a boot, or something else?), though any example that gives students the opportunity to try different search words is effective. For example, I often use a shiny sneaker that some students describe as “rainbow,” others as “metallic,” and yet others as “holographic.” As students race to be one of the first to locate the projected item, they try multiple search strategies and keep track of which words lead them to success. Will “holographic chunky sneaker” get the right result, or will they need to try “holographic lace-up gym shoe”? It isn’t unusual for the classroom to get noisy as students brainstorm with each other and laugh at how challenging a simple exercise can be.
When the activity is finished, I lead a class discussion about how students can pretend that their paper topics are like the shoes they were trying to find. Just like in the activity, to search for information on their topic, they need to think of several ways to describe the concepts and ideas they’ll be writing about. We practice together on a sample topic about loneliness in college students and create a list of keywords that students can use to locate sources as they begin to write: just as they could describe the shoe as a sneaker, tennis shoe, or gym shoe, they can talk about loneliness as isolation, separation, or even mental health. This activity is particularly successful ahead of instruction on using databases or search engines.