The Game

When Zombies Attack: How to Survive (and Thrive) during a Zombie Apocalypse

The Players

(Or as we call ourselves, the Business Librarian Zombie Guides)

• Melissa Johnson, Instructional Design & Educational Technologies Librarian

• Tracey Rinehart, Instruction Coordinator and Business Graduate Programs Librarian

• Gayle Freeman-Staggs, Student Success Librarian

• Justin Harrison, Business Undergraduate Program Librarian

• Sandy Miller, Director of the Business Library

The Arena

The Business Library, embedded within Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Cox School of Business (Cox), touches all undergraduate and graduate programs through in-person and synchronous online orientations and teaches all undergraduate students through the scaffolded BBA Library Research Program. This effort incorporates library research components in core business courses: BLI 1110/1210: Business Discovery / Business Communications, ITOM 2308: Information Systems for Management, STRA 4370: Strategic Management in a Global Economy, CISB 4397: Entrepreneurship: Starting a Business, FINA 4126/4326: Quantitative Financial Modeling Lab / Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management, MNO 3371: Human Capital and Talent Management, and MKTG 3342: Marketing Research.. The Business Library operates with a dedicated staff of four full-time librarians and a full-time library manager. From June 2022 through December 2023, business librarians taught 97 instruction sessions, 118 workshops, 37 orientations, provided 43 instances of course support, and maintained 21 online tutorials (Business Library, 2024).

Challenge Mode

In late fall 2022, the Director of Experiential and Engaged Education at SMU Cox reached out to the Business Library to invite us to participate as instructors in a 2.5-hour master class with the incoming spring cohort of Online MBA (OMBA) students as part of their on-campus immersion experience. The OMBA immersion took place over four days and brought the geographically diverse students to the Southern Methodist University (SMU) campus for networking opportunities, community building, and self-selected master classes covering entrepreneurship, crisis management, energy and sustainability, game theory, and leadership. We were elated, and nervous, about how we would engage with the students during an extended time with them and keep their interest and attention. Our usual online orientations with this group last 15 minutes. At the time, the author in her role as Instructional Design Librarian pitched an “out there” idea to combine business and zombies with the hook that students would develop a business plan to survive a zombie apocalypse. She based this idea on game-based learning and its benefits.

Gamification primarily involves applying game elements in other contexts, such as a rewards system (Dodson, 2021); whereas game-based learning “uses game elements to help students learn new content and practice new skills in a risk-free setting” (Ross, 2020, para 3). According to Ross (2020), benefits can include promoting a deeper understanding of concepts, encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving skills, developing self-directed learners, and if students work in teams, encouraging negotiation skills. Dodson (2021) adds that gamification can increase knowledge retention and build a sense of community among participants. Not to mention, that while students are learning, they’re having fun and are engaged. As librarians, our main goals are to guide student success by educating them to be critical consumers of knowledge while establishing a rapport with them, and to instill in them a positive and memorable experience of how the library can help them. So, zombies it was!

Johnson used the Wiggins and McTighe model of backward design to plan out the full session: what do we want the students to be able to do, how are we going to assess they can do it, and what activities will we use to meet the goals (2005). The students’ zombie plans would be grounded in the SMU Cox School of Business tenets of teamwork and experiential learning, while covering foundational business concepts of demographic, organizational behavior, company, and industry research. Student deliverables would be an executive summary and elevator pitches. To further add to the experience, each team would have to overcome a challenge, otherwise known as a pain point in our business courses, to solve the problem and create a cohesive plan to survive and thrive. To encourage a friendly sense of competition and add to the gamification nature of the session, teams would compete to be voted the best ally by the other participants. Winners would receive individual zombie medals and a shared golden zombie trophy; all participants receive a zombie sticker (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Zombie Medal, Golden Zombie Trophy, and Zombie Participation Sticker.

This idea took some convincing for leadership and faculty buy-in and was a team effort by all the business librarians. Through successful internal meetings and communications, the Business Library Director was able to demonstrate to external leadership how the zombie session would require all participants to learn business research skills, provide low-stakes practice with creating an executive summary and delivering an elevator pitch, and create a sense of community among the participating cohorts in the OMBA on-campus immersion experience. To increase engagement with business students, we also successfully pitched our zombie sessions as a unique way to introduce library resources and build teamwork among incoming graduate cohorts within the Executive MBA students and as a regular session with the Business Leadership Center.

Game On: Zombie Day

The Strategy Guide

We share the student learning objectives to help set the tone of how it relates to the library and business research: to demonstrate business research proficiencies; to apply complex problem-solving skills to an experiential situation; and to explore strategic thinking to design innovative or unique solutions. We then divide students into groups and give them a few minutes to meet each other and come up with their zombie team names. Students show lots of creativity in the naming, and it adds to the fun. We regroup and direct students to the When Zombies Attack Research Guide (Figure 2) created in LibGuides that we use throughout the session, or what we call our roadmap, link included in references. We remind them of the learning objectives and introduce the student deliverables, the completed executive summary, and elevator pitches, up-front so teams can work on them full-time as well as have a clear idea of what’s expected of them.

Figure 2.

When Zombies Attack Research Guide (Business Library, 2021)

Figure 2 shows all the tabs open, but in the session, students only see the Overview and Executive Summary tabs when we start. We introduce each research section tab one at a time to help minimize cognitive load (Mayer & Moreno, 2003). Each research section tab includes guiding questions and between three to four recommended business databases to help students focus on the type of research needed for their plans. For example, the “Demographics” guiding questions are:

• Where will your team establish your home/base of operations?

• What type of people live there? Think inclusively, what voices are missing from your team or are not represented.

• What unique or useful resources are found in this area?

Students are given 15 minutes to research each section before we unveil the next section. To challenge participants, at the end of the Organizational Behavior section, we throw in a pain point video (Walker, 2021) that the zombies destroyed all the fresh water supplies. At this point, as students watch the video we see smiles, hear groans and lots of collaborating amongst teammates to assess if their location is still viable and how. After all sections are unveiled, we provide teams with dedicated time to finesse and finalize their executive summaries and elevator pitches. Then the teams present their plans. Since it’s an elevator pitch style, we limit teams to five minutes and use a timer for accountability. Next, each person votes individually using a Poll Everywhere poll on which team they’d most like to ally with. Teams cannot vote to ally with themselves. Once a clear winner has been decided, we do a brief awards ceremony and provide each team member with the medal and the team with the Golden Zombie trophy. Finally, we recap what the session covered, share how they can learn more at library workshops, and thank them for playing.

Experience Points

With great risks come great rewards and ours were invaluable! Our inaugural zombie experience and our current ones have taught us to:

• Let students lead and surprise you.

• Be open to the unexpected and students’ creative potential.

• Build in enough guidelines to ensure students are invested and allow them the freedom to adjust.

• Teamwork and friendly competition generate student excitement and motivation.

• Time management and co-teaching are key.

When you give students agency, and the trust, to be in charge of their own education, they not only meet but exceed your expectations- not just with their creativity but with their drive to be the best. The first time we taught this session with the OMBA Master Class we really wanted to see what students would do and didn’t want to put too many guardrails on the lesson design. As a result, we originally didn’t require that teams use at least one business database with each research section. Our hope was that they would naturally gravitate to them since they were supplied on the guide. However, after listening to their pitches and reviewing their written executive summaries to see what sources they did use, we learned that students do need limited guidance as they can be very creative with what they consider sources and internalize information. For example, one student cited their own brain; whereas other teams, found islands with no zombies!

The range of responses showed us it is helpful to provide some lightweight guardrails up-front, such as the zombie apocalypse is bite-driven, affects every location, and that use of business databases are required regardless of additional sources used. With the groups that did use business databases, we were overwhelmed with the thought and care that went into their zombie planning. We joke at the end of the session that teams should be prepared to take business librarians with them, but really, students took this experience seriously and this was demonstrated in their well-researched plans. I would happily add myself to many of the teams as another survivor.

We also observed students needed more dedicated time for their deliverables and that language matters. Originally when we first taught our workshop, it included four research sections: Demographics, Organizational Behavior, Companies & Financials, and Industries & Markets. The financials section confused students as they wondered why money was a concern when zombies are attacking, which is a very valid point indeed. Based on their feedback, we reframed that section to be focused on replenishing resources with an eye towards sustainability. Also, since company and industry research overlap quite a bit, we combined those two tabs. With the extra time back (15 minutes), we were able to allot it to allow students to work on polishing and finalizing their pitches and executive summaries. By listening to their feedback on what confused them and adjusting, we made future zombie sessions a smoother and more enriching experience.

Excitement is catching and when instructors are loving what they teach the joy transfers to the students. We offer a short break in all our sessions, and we’ve yet to see all students take it! As with many business programs, offering some type of external motivation, e.g. a competition with tangible rewards, really does go a long way to helping teams work together cohesively and with purpose. Our program is intentionally designed to be low-stakes and fun, but with each session, students show us maximum effort to pitch themselves as the best ally so they can win the Golden Zombie trophy. We also saw and heard, how much students were enjoying the experience, getting to work together to solve an out-of-the-box problem, and engage with the Business Library in a unique way.

Finally, time management is a must. In our sessions, we set timers for each section to stay on track and keep the session moving forward. We also hold dress rehearsals before each zombie class to ensure we have our flow, style, and language worked out. It keeps our sessions fresh for us and for the students. Working as a team to co-teach truly makes a marked difference. Behind the scenes while one librarian is teaching the other can be unhiding tabs, queuing the pain point video, and setting up the ally poll. Plus, students experience diverse teaching styles and the highly interactive session benefits from having another librarian to roam, answer questions, and engage with students.

End Game

As our zombie sessions have been so successful with SMU Cox graduate programs, we want to increase our involvement with business undergraduate students. We’ve tried offering the session as a special one-off workshop each semester. However, the time commitment still appears to be an obstacle even though we’ve been able to modify it from 2.5 hours to 1.5 hours. Currently, we’re workshopping other ways we can reach out to undergraduate students. Our Instruction Coordinator thinks that connecting with student clubs may be a good avenue. Overall, the zombies have taught us shepherded chaos yields fantastic results in the classroom, from both instructor and student perspectives. One participant, whose team plan was to cruise to New Zealand based on their COVID response, shared that 1) it was great 2) we shouldn’t change a thing and 3) we should offer it again next year. Another participant came up to our table at the closing immersion dinner to pitch again why their zombie plan really did make them the best ally (they chose the Dallas Zoo as their home base and planned to use the animals as a built-in defense). The OMBA immersion program director shared that after the first day they had students calling and requesting to switch their master class selections to our zombies! A lasting impression from zombies is that through these experiences as a team we’ve relearned why we enjoy teaching and it’s offered us new ways to engage and reach students. In short, the undead revitalized us.