Games provide opportunities for students to actively apply and build their understandings of concepts. This presents great potential for online students, who must engage with course content on their own schedules. At North Carolina Wesleyan College, there are many adult students with busy schedules outside of classes, and not all campuses have libraries. These students' experiences of library resources are almost entirely online. As the emerging technologies and outreach librarian, one of my tasks is to develop tools these students can access and learn from at times appropriate for their schedules. When the college's instructional technologist introduced me to Office Mix, a free sreencasting add-on for Power-Point that allowed content to remain clickable after being posted online. I used it to develop an interactive game for students to play as an engaging, experiential introduction to finding scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles. This experience has provided me with skills invaluable for my educational endeavors.

Boucher, Ian. Case Study: Creating Free Online Branching Games with PowerPoint Skills. In Library Services for Online Patrons: A Manual for Facilitating Access, Learning, and Engagement, edited by Joelle E. Pitts, Laura Bonella, Jason M. Coleman, and Adam Wathen, 94-96. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2019.

Ian Boucher is an Information Literacy Librarian at Dickinson College.

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