The Great Reading Adventure

About the Program

Category: Libraries (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

2013, the Maricopa County Library District (MCLD) built an open source web application to enhance its Summer Reading Program. The purpose of this web app, called The Great Reading Adventure (www.greatreadingadventure.com), was to increase the impact of the program by delivering educational content directly to participants. MCLD built the framework for deploying the content, but lacked the internal expertise to properly develop the educational games. MCLD took its dilemma to the Maricopa County Education Service Agency (MCESA). MCESA’s content development team created content for thirteen different literacy games. Each game had an easy, medium, and hard difficulty level. These games were played 26,140 times by the 31,054 children who signed up for the program and more than half of children surveyed indicated they had learned something from the games, and an even higher majority reported that the games were fun to play. This partnership resulted in a better experience for participants in the program, and resulted in even greater collaboration between the two County departments. The purpose of this project was to provide better, more content-rich Summer Reading Program. We hope that by enhancing this service, we could do more to help children maintain their reading skills over the summer. For this pilot year, we measured our success in engagement. With our previous online tracking system, there was no interaction beyond logging the amount of reading that was done. The Great Reading Adventure allowed us, for the first time, to track reading, game play, and in-library event participation. Using engagement as a measure, the program was incredibly successful. Next year, with MCESA’s literacy test content, the program will be easier to quantitatively measure. But based on customer survey feedback, the outcome of having more engaged readers and increasing impact was met.