Guess the Google

I learned something new this week but I didn't learn it by sitting through a webinar or by traveling down the road to a conference; I learned it from talking with friends on Facebook.

Here's the scenario. I'm preparing two 1/2 day reference workshops on behalf of Elizabeth Hulett, Head of Adult Services at WCFL and I have the pleasure of teaching 8 of my colleagues all about Google and some of the library databases. 

As I was going through my 5 questions for assessment design that I use to craft all of the workshops I present myself, I came to the third question: Pedagogy: What's the learning activity? I could simply repeat what I did last year for a different group of colleagues but where's the fun in that? 

I tried brainstorming some ideas by flipping through various instruction materials I've acquired over the years but nothing was jumping out at me so, I decided to crowd-source my brainstorming efforts by posting the question to Facebook.

That's when I learned about a new and fun way to introduce Google.

The game is called Guess the Google and there used to be a web-based version of it but I found out that it has been taken offline for maintenance so, there's nothing for me to link you to so you can experience it yourself. I am making my own PowerPoint version for the workshop.

What you do: 

1. Do a Google Image search for something - the level of difficulty depends on who you're going to be playing this with. So far, I've opted toward creating several different rounds, each one increasing in difficulty. An easy search would be "dog" and a hard search would be "perturbed."
2. Browse through the image results and select about 7-9 images to make a PowerPoint collage. The images you select depends on how difficult you want to make it for the players. For example, for the dog search, to make it extremely easy I would copy and paste a bunch of pictures of dogs. To make it harder I would scroll further down in the results list and select images that aren't of dogs but are of some obscure reference to dogs like feet or Dog the Bounty Hunter.
3. Once the collages are complete, you play by showing the collage to the players and then they have to guess what you typed into the Google search box that retrieved those image results. You can try it with the two below and you can put your guesses in the comments field

Guess the Google (easy)

 

Guess the Google (hard)