Teen Tech Week Prizes

[Kelly Scherer]

I'm thinking of having a TTW Bingo program where our teens can participate in TTW by filling out the bingo card by doing tech-y things like checking out our teen page or getting an eBook. For incentives my first idea was to give out a coupon for an extra hour on the computers (computer use is big at our library). Some of our teens, however, won't be interested in extra computer usage as they have their own at home and I need another idea for a participation prize to get them interested. This is where I'm drawing a blank. I need something tech-ish but cheap. Any ideas?

[Mollie Mulligan]

Could you get local businesses to donate some gift cards- we have some very popular downtown novelty shops and coffee shops... 

I'd love to hear some of your bingo square ideas. 

[Donna Block]

what about colorful USB flash drives?

[Kelly Scherer]

Mollie and Donna, thanks for your suggestions. I spoke with my Head Librarian and we've decided earbud headphones would be a good prize considering how many kids ask if we have any spares.

As for some of the bingo square ideas, I wanted to get the teens doing tech-savy things like following us on our social media sites (this way they can stay informed on other events/programs we have going on), using the catalog to find/order something, watch book reviews on youtube, read a blog entry about technology in the library, and my personal favorite, message their favorite author on a social media site that they use (how cool would it be if they got a message back!?).

Hopefully there are no hangups during TTW, but I'm really excited to see how this turns out either way.

[Mollie Mulligan]

I LOVE the idea of messaging your favorite author! Thanks for the idea.

[Lana Fain]

How do you know they really did these things?  Are you using an honor system or requiring any documentation?      I like your idea and am trying to figure out how to do something similar.

                    

                    

[Kelly Scherer]

We'll be initialing the bingo sheets as they complete each task so this will promote participating in this program while in the library. As an example, one of the tasks is visiting our Teen Page, so they would simply show us they are visiting our site and we would sign off on it.

[Mollie Mulligan]

For most of our activities they will have to come up with some sort of information which suggests they did the challenge. (Our bingo is a mix of low and high tech.) Ex: Play song #5 on the tape, write the first line.  or Find the TTW logo on our website (which is buried within our teen pages) etc.