St. Albert students pursue a madman through the depths of the Earth this summer as part of a free reading game at the city library.
Thousands of St. Albert readers will be deputized as Agents of U.N.D.E.R. starting this Thursday as the 37th annual St. Albert Public Library Summer Reading Games get underway.
Established in 1982, the library’s summer reading games program has for decades challenged kids young and old to get hooked on books using elaborate games, challenges and sets. Library officials say some 2,074 kids enrolled in last year’s game, with another 1,026 taking part in the preschool edition of it.
Summer students have been working on this year’s game since May and are now finishing up the sets, which fill the library’s program room and include several bookshelves and the children’s reference desk in the main library, said librarian Drew Thomas.
“It’s fully immersive. You feel like you’re there.”
Since last year’s game was about outer space, this year the game team decided to do a 180 and go underground, said Isabella Mello, a three-year veteran of the summer reading games design team. This year’s Grade 1 to 6 game is a sci-fi/action adventure called Journey to the Core.
“In this game you work for an organization called U.N.D.E.R.,” said Mello, or the Underground National Defence for Earth’s Rescue.
The rouge agent Atlas Digger is attempting to reach Earth’s core and is setting off volcanoes and earthquakes and disrupting many innocent underground civilizations in the process, Mello explained.
Players will have to traverse jewel-studded tunnels with the help of Lumo the anglerfish, Koda the badger or Shadow the bat to stop Digger and undo the damage he has caused. That might involve sorting eggs amongst the floating isles of the dragons, playing an ukulele for mermaids or delving deep into the mines of Moleville. (Moleville itself was actually suggested by a player in last year’s game, Mello noted.) Each challenge also tasks players with reading certain categories of book.
Players get to take one turn per day as they work their way to their final confrontation with Digger at the Earth’s core on Turn 7, Mello said. Winners get a free book and can play again with a different animal companion (each of which has a different storyline).
Mello said the team has made a simpler game for preschoolers that sees them explore an underground kingdom in search of treasure as Tunnel Travellers. Upstairs, the library is offering teen readers a chance to solve puzzles posed by the interdimensional World Tree and adults an opportunity to spin the wheel of books.
The real prize: literacy
Thomas said the whole point of the game is to get kids out of the house and into reading.
“We want kids to just open that book,” he said, whether it be an e-book, audio book, graphic novel or magazine, and hopefully keep reading once the game is over.
Mello, who played the reading games when she was younger and later became a volunteer at the library, said she loves seeing the reaction of parents and kids each year when they see the game set for the first time.
“It’s really great to hear when parents say their kids keep asking them to come back to the library because they want to read more and more books,” Mello said.
The summer reading games run from June 27 to Aug. 20 and are free. Call the children’s reference desk at 780-459-1532 for details.
