Last night, our TSRP tried out a cell phone game @ the mall.  It went… terrific!  I’m posting it here to share with other libraries serving teens because (a.) it was cheap — the only cost was prizes and gas to get to the mall, and (b.) it was A BIG HIT with the seventeen teens who participated, and finally, (c.) it can be adapted to work in any environment, including inside the library.  Now doesn’t that sound like a terrific teens and tech program?  Here is what we did:

The night before, we took a notepad to the mall and wrote short questions and their short answers.  Some of them were “finish the pattern” type questions, and some of them were specific to signs and displays in store windows.  When we got home, I asked my daughter (who is a wicked fast texter who knows how to spell) to send me the questions.  The next morning, I typed the questions and answers and asked Aaron the intern to print it and make copies.

As the teens arrived, I got phone numbers for those who were willing to use their phones for the game — those with unlimited texting and fast, reliable phones.  I named them 1, 12, 13, 14, and 15.  That made all of them appear at the top of my contact list, making it a breeze to send texts to this group of multiple recipients.  I didn’t bother making them a real group on my phone since I wasn’t going to keep the numbers.  Then the teens got themselves into groups with the phone holders.

After telling them the simple rules — and where to go if they got rowdy enough to get kicked out of the mall, I started forwarding them the questions and…. they were off!  The two interns kept track of the teams’ correct answers on the question and answer sheets while I read the texted answers to them.  It took about an hour and a half for the first team to finish and ten minutes more for the second team.  All teams thought they were done before they were (I’d instructed them to text me a “done” message.)  I responded with a “Not! Come see us” text and the interns would tell them which questions they still needed a correct answer for.  While the teams searched, the interns, volunteer drivers and I feasted on French fries in the food court and laughed at some of the crazy answers we were being texted.

That’s all!  Less than one hour of prep time and one heck of a fun teen/tech/game program.  If you plan something like this, I would say that the most important thing is to make sure to have three people to handle the incoming texts from every five to six teams — one to read the texts out loud and two to mark the teams’ answer sheets.  I would have been lost without Ross and Aaron.