I’ve been thinking about an Omeka plugin that would encourage K-12 and college students to play in the archives. How can one play in the archives? Playing and exploring are very similar. Playing is about exploring a possibility space. When a cat plays with a string, it is exploring the spatial possibilities of the string, possibilities largely defined by physical constraints. Similarly, when one plays a game of soccer, she is searching for those constrained actions that lead to the highest score. As playing takes on more specific goals (and constraints), it becomes a game. Playing and gaming is not always fun; sometimes it’s tedious work, especially if the exploratory actions are not linked to explicit and immediate rewards. So again, how can we play in the archives? Moreover, how can students play in the archives, so that they can learn how to think historically?

During THATCamp, I’d like to brainstorm some potential answers to these questions.

One answer, I’ve come up with is a treasure hunting game bundled into an Omeka plugin. The idea is that students break into teams, and then collectively search the virtual archive for certain items, adding them to their team basket. Before the treasure hunt begins, teachers must create one and assign it to their class.

To create a treasure hunt, teachers explore the archive, and tag archive items with questions, answers to which are partially or fully answered by information contained in the archive items. After students sign up for a treasure hunt created by their teacher, they are randomly assigned a team. Each team of students is assigned a random set of questions for that treasure hunt. The students must search the archive for items that help answer their questions. To answer a question, the student must write a textual answer and link it to archive items in their team basket. The archive items serve as evidence for their answers.

Different students can play different roles in this search game. Some students will search the archives, adding interesting archive items to the team basket, while other students will craft language to answer their questions, supporting their claims by linking them to collected archive items.

What is playful about this treasure hunt game? First, it reframes archival research as a social experience, where students experiment with different ways to jointly browse the archive, collectively looking for clues, hints, and connections to the questions at hand. Second, it recasts evidence as treasure, encouraging students to re-imagine research as a creative process of discovery and persuasion.

Extensions to the treasure hunt plugin include:

1) allowing the students to help construct the treasure hunt

2) allowing teachers to share questions and treasure hunts

3) allowing teachers to attach hints to items

4) devising competitive metrics between groups (shortest time to answer all question, highest number of votes per question, teacher’s favorite, etc.)

We may also want to think about how games such as “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” structure historical thinking.