[Edited 8/15/2025 to include the costs of the awards and prizes]
Part of a series of reflections on some of the affective components of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) program, things I put in place to make the Scholars feel welcomed and delighted in the learning environment.
Awards and prizes in the in-person workshop
To encourage participation during the lecture parts of the summer research workshop, the instructors embedded questions, quizzes, and group activities into their presentations. While the workshop was in person, the instructors would award small prizes for the participants brave enough to answer a question, jump in to share an opinion, or offer a reflection. I bought a bunch of prizes at the Dollar Store ahead of the workshop and put them in a basket so the instructors could easily see all of them. The instructors could choose to award a big sticker, a sheet of stickers, a puzzle, a frisbee, a travel game, etc., depending on how “big” the question was that the participant answered. Once the participants saw what the prizes were in the basket, they’d answer a question in order to make a request for a specific prize.
The prizes met the program design goal we were after, to make participating fun and silly, with a low threat. The instructors even awarded prizes to wrong answers if they were especially good or funny.
Here are a few of the prizes:
A screenshot from an old tweet from a participant that won a puzzle.
Crossword puzzle book prize
A tattoo sleeve prize
In addition, there were group prizes, of which the favorite was for the sampling visualization challenge, where a group of participants needed to work together to use available items in the room to demonstrate an assigned sampling technique. Here’s a photo of one of the group awards:
A photograph of the group that won a group prize of stick-on mustaches, for their efforts in visualizing the simple random sampling technique.
The awards and prizes for the in-person workshop were purchased from the Dollar Store and Amazon, for a cost of around $100.
Awards and prizes in the online workshop
A consideration when we moved the 10-day workshop to an online environment was the amount of time spent synchronously on Zoom. Even with plenty of scheduled and spontaneous screen breaks, asking the Scholars to maintain focus on lectures and exercises seemed like a big request.
A small reward for the Scholars to keep their eyes on the PowerPoint slides was a challenge I designed, named Hidden Iggys. This was the premise:
LA is very close to Disneyland and here at LMU we are familiar with all things Disney. One thing you can do at Disneyland is look for Mickey-Mouse shaped objects throughout the theme park, called “Hidden Mickeys” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Mickey). They’re just for fun, to see how close you’re paying attention as you go through the park.
IRDL has taken that idea and has hidden some images of the LMU mascot lion, named Iggy, in the slide decks. If you spot an Iggy in the slide deck during the lecture, then fill out the Google form telling us where you saw it and get entered into a raffle to win an LMU t-shirt. The Iggys can be large, they can be small, they can be distinct, they can be blurred, and they may be different colors.
There are 2 Iggys each day with lectures, for a total of 18 Iggys. Your name will be entered into the raffle for each Iggy you find. Get them all!
FILL OUT THE FORM FOR EACH IGGY YOU SPOT
All the Iggys will have this same basic shape:
The Google form requested the title of the slide deck where they spotted the Iggy, the slide number, and the Scholar’s name. The Scholars had access to the slides, so they could look for the Iggys there if they didn’t notice them during the lecture session.
After the last lecture section, I used a random number generator to choose one of the entries from the form. The winner got to select from LMU’s online store a branded item to be sent to them in the mail.
Here’s a screenshot of one of the slides with an Iggy “hidden” on it:
A hidden Iggy on a lecture slide
The Hidden Iggy prize cost around $25. The group prize for collaborative demonstration of a sampling technique cost $25 ($5 gift card each, for 5 Scholars).
